The death of human moderated search engines continues as one of the longest surviving - perhaps THE longest surviving version has now closed its doors. A human moderated search engine is one where you can ask your question, and it will be passed onto a real live person to give you an answer. In total ChaCha answered about 2.25 billion questions, had 100,000 guides and employed about 440 people. At its peak it had about 370 million page views in August 2012, and this had dropped to 6 million in November 2016.
It really does seem that this type of engine doesn't work. Mahalo tried and failed, as did TrueKnowledge and we're currently left with AskJelly and Answerbag with probably the best being WikiAnswers. The fatal flaw in these things seems to be two fold. Firstly, there's no structure to it; serious questions sit side by side with trivia, and you can't ever be sure that your query is going to be answered already, so you have to wait some time before it is, and most people want answers *now*, not in a few hours time. Secondly, who is the person giving you the answer, and can you trust them? Not so bad if it's a straightforward question with a factual answer, but anything that has even a slight nuance is going to subject to the attitude and opinions of the person answering.
Comments