Found something neat...

Cha Cha or not to Cha Cha :p

I'm not talking dancing lessons here, but something new and interesting in the world that relates to information sciences.


http://www.chacha.com/

This is supposed to be the new internet search tool, which blends a bit of everything while you search. Here is the posting that I found relating to this newish tool (release date was last fall):

"Late Breaking News: ChaCha: A Search Engine Powered by Human Intelligence
http://www.chacha.com/

New Engine 'ChaCha' Offers Real-Time Answers From Live 'Guides'

Part Wikipedia, part Yahoo Answers and part About.com, ChaCha is a new
search engine with a compelling hook - real-time results from human
beings. The site launches (in "Alpha") today and offers users two ways
to search: traditional algorithmic results or help from live "guides."
Users interact with guides via an embedded instant messaging window in
the search results page.

Brad Bostic, co-founder of ChaCha, said that the site had lined up
about 2500 guides at launch: college students, retirees, stay-at-home
moms and others "who are online all day anyway." But not just anyone can
become a guide apparently; you have to be "sponsored" (invited by an
existing guide) and work your way up a hierarchy consisting of four
levels."

I actually did some testing, posted a question to be done with a guide and got the chance to converse with him. It was pretty neat. Basically, guides, which are invited by other guides as somewhat subject specialists, help you with their query. This is how I understood it works when running a query. Basically the database looks at key words in your search, identifies those key words, and looks up "guides" which have the interest/specialty related to your question. What it basically does, it identifies metadata tags to each guide and when the search is started, it identifies a guide who is free and accessible with which the tags corresponds and opens up a chat window with that guide. I hope my explanation isn't too complicated, but it could be useful if you ever want to try it. I was tempted to ask a J. Noon RQ, but I figured I didn't want to lead them into a depressive state :p Anywho, that's how my Monday morning at work started out. I found this information on a blog page on one of the NRCan library sites. Anywho, hope this was useful, but now I should get back to my work :)

Cheers for now :)

Jer l'Acadien