ChaCha’s "mobile social search" wins an innovation award.
“Frost & Sullivan recognizes ChaCha Search with the 2008 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Innovation. ChaCha was identified for its successful discovery of the key requirements of mobile search users as well as for its offer of a unique solution that provides the most enhanced user experience within the mobile environment.”
Press Release: “Frost & Sullivan Recognizes ChaCha for Product Innovation.”
I just tested ChaCha to get info on the next innovation event in Chicago. See above six snapshots depict the process. To do a search you can text a question to 242242 and will receive an automated acknowledgment right away. The third SMS screen delivers the search results with a link.
Clicking on the link opens the phone’s mobile browser, ChaCha’s page delivers two more links: “visit the source website” and “view info about your guide.” The source website turned out to be the web page for the Chicago Innovation Awards, which was not optimized for mobile browsers. Nonetheless, this website is obviously relevant to my search request. However, ChaCha’s delivery left out others such as MIT Enterprise Forum of Chicago.
The last screenshot delivers some info about my guide: Timothy E. ChaCha leverages the concept of “social searching.” This means that a human being, Timothy in this case, made a judgement call on what he thought was relevant to my query. ChaCha’s system selects the most knowledgeable person in the “guide community” to address each mobile search. The technology also learns from each answer to improve the accuracy and the speed of future searches.
Links of interest:
- ChaCha’s website.
- ChaCha’s Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ChaChacom/19020889551
| J. de Francisco |  |
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| Chicago, IL 20 August 08 |  |
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The idea of having this be a mobile feature is unbelievably innovative. The social aspect of the search is efficient because it produces relevant results. If you think social search is useful try out Me.dium’s new search engine that is crowd powered. The results produced are compiled through what people are actually surfing at the time. Check it out. http://me.dium.com/search
Chris
August 20, 2008 at 10:53 am