Indiana University Dumps Google for ChaCha

theodp writes "Come Monday, no more Indiana University searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha. The move was announced by new IU President Michael McRobbie, who until recently sat on ChaCha's Board of Directors (5-29 SEC filing, PDF). IU will draft hundreds of librarians and IT employees to be ChaCha Guides for the university's websites, although a FAQ accompanying IU's press release tells librarians not to expect any checks for their efforts from ChaCha, which IU notes is backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Compaq founder Rod Canion."

What an amazing coincidence.

[Spazntwich]

For the former president of a company to be so prescient so as to recognize ChaCha's innate superiority to the number one worldwide search engine.

I honestly didn't know anyone used ChaCha for anything besides screwing with the people. There have been epic forum threads based on ChaCha.

Re:AskJeeves2?

[ivan256]

I'm imagining a bunch of "guides" searching Google for you instead of letting you do it yourself.

Seriously though, who knows? Maybe enough people suck at searching to make this service worthwhile, but I don't see how it could ever be profitable. Unless they somehow think they can get away without paying anybody.

Re:Big news ?

[irritating environme]

Um, maybe because public employees are being forced to donate labor toward a private company the university president has glaring conflict-of-interest ties with?

Other than that...

why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm puzzled by the benefits of this. IU, like other large establishments, sets up web pages and other tools so that instead of needing to have humans answer questions, computers can index things.
This article cites the benefits of having a human guide such as

"IU's guides could be asked to locate a building on campus", (use a campus map)

"find a book in one of the university's libraries" (use a library web page)or

"solve a question about Windows Vista (use Microsoft s knowledge base)".

Then IU does the asinine thing of replacing search results compiled by google appliances with human filtered ones. How much revenue does this give to cha-cha?

Re:Big news ?

[pthor1231]

That's fine, but what is not fine is him making decisions in a position of power at IU that have a direct financial effect on a company he still likely receives payment in some form from. That is about as close to conflict of interest as you can get.

Re:What an amazing coincidence.

[KillerCow]

Seriously, it seems like a major conflict of interest. Why is the president of the University making decisions like this anyway?

Presidents are only good for making decisions that have conflicts of interest to promote cronyism. You get into those positions because you have ties to important people.

Take a look at U.Waterloo.

Hello Mr. Lazaridis. Yes, you dropped out of our school, but thanks for that 100 Million dollars. How would you like to be our chancellor? You would? Great! What's that? You're company is having space issues? Please take one of our buildings!

Re:How does it differ from downloading term papers

[TapeCutter]

"I'm pretty sure that nobody gets graded on how good their searches are."

Contrary to popular opinion a respectable degree does not simply cram as many facts into your head as will fit. A university degree is supposed to give one the skills to find known answers to a question, any question!

Re:Big news ?

[Danse]

There's nothing in the actual FACTS presented that represents a conflict of interest. You (and many other people) may wish to presume that there is a conflict of interest, and hence corruption, involved; but it's still nothing more than presumption.

Yeah, because corrupt individuals always just come out and tell you that they're corrupt. Happens all the time on your planet I'm sure.

As a matter of principle, I choose to presume innocence until there is evidence of guilt; as that is the presumption that I wish others to make when viewing my actions.

Good luck with that.

Re:An answer to why people use it

[ds_job]

That's the problem. You chose three words whereas I chose a slightly different three words.
Apparently these are called "peanuts" which I would never have guessed. I could have chosen Expanded or honeycomb instead of foam, and Foodstuff or food instead of edible and they would have given different answers. In fact, I did search for a while myself before I went to ChaCha and the first guide drew a blank and the second one finally got what I wanted. Having the human element is what helps this search engine because they can choose different phraseology to get different results and save me a spit load of time and energy.

Re:How does it differ from downloading term papers

[br14n420]

Contrary to popular opinion a respectable degree does not simply cram as many facts into your head as will fit. A university degree is supposed to give one the skills to find known answers to a question, any question!

Well, it does teach an excellent lesson. If you are making $180k/yr, is it less expensive to sit there on the clock fishing through mountains of bullshit on Google, or sub out the work to a subordinate to do the work and come back with a nicely put together report? The answer is simply "yeah, you are going to save money having some monkey do the monkey work."

One could easily use the same logic to say that use of a secretary or executive assistant to do the things you don't have the time to deal with and still accomplish your primary objectives for the day.

I do think ChaCha is garbage, but I don't think it is cheating.

A final thought comes to mind that I didn't wedge in above: Today's students are a bit different than those of previous generations. I recall most students not having full-time jobs and getting far more than 4 hours of sleep a night between school/work/social activities back in my day. Anything to lessen the load and give a more accurate model of life in the professional world is a good thing.