Answer texted to my phone: “AltSearchEngines. Charles Knight maintains a list of the Top 100 alternative and niche search engines.” What accuracy!

Guest Author: Peggy Anne Salz

Original post (with podcast):

In-Brief: The recent news that people-powered mobile search provider ChaCha is ramping up with the addition of two telecom veterans tells me that Brad Bostic, President and co-founder, is gearing up to make good on the roadmap he outlined in this exclusive podcast. Today, ChaCha is taking the wraps off a service that lets users call in their queries via a toll-free number, and gearing up to be sure mobile advertising is linked to more than just search results.

Regular readers will know I am passionate about vertical mobile search and keep a watch for companies that are decidedly different from the “usual suspects” we know from the headlines. It’s MSG’s remit to identify and profile alternative search engines in the mobile space, which is one reason why I was excited to see this post from AltSearchEngines (via email) last week. True to the title, it names five excellent mobile search engines – a welcome confirmation that it is indeed an electrifying time in the mobile search space. I’m looking forward to a briefing with Alex Muller, CEO of Slifter, a mobile search engine that made Charles Knight’s list over at AltSearchEngines during CTIA. If you are a search provider – and that includes local, multimodal, voice, visual, vertical or social — then please reach out to me directly.

A company I have followed from the start is ChaCha. (In fact, I’m proud that I was among the first the company briefed on its mobile aspirations.) I wrote about it in this article I contributed to the November 2007 issue of eContent Magazine, which I highly suggest you read for background and context. In a nutshell, ChaCha has developed a “search-with-a-guide” process that lets stumped searchers connect with a live person – in real-time and via an instant message chat – for answers (in the form of relevant links and results). In January, ChaCha brought its value prop to mobile, announcing a new service that allows users to text questions of any kind to 242242 (ChaCha on a phone keypad) and to receive text answers on their phone.

I caught up with Brad to ask about service usage and search queries, and drill down into his announcement (via his blog) that “ChaCha’s team is working to pioneer new models for mobile advertising that will deliver enhanced value to users.”

The mobile user experience: “When you ask your question with a text message, it’s kind of like asking a really smart friend….And our technology routes your question to the best possible guide out of our entire community of guides to answer the question at that instant. So within a couple of minutes, you’ll be able to receive an answer back to your question. These guides are not only targeted based on their knowledge, but they’re also trained in our ChaCha Search University, which is a very rigorous program for making sure they’re extremely well-suited to get information quickly to answer your question….Back on your phone, you get the answer in a text message along with a short URL that actually would take you to the source website for that answer, if your phone has a browser on it.”

Upcoming voice functionality: Expect voice and enhancements. As Brad put it: “You’ll be able to just call an 800 number and ask your question with your own voice. That question will [be] routed to the best possible guide and then your answer comes back to your phone in a text message. It just makes it much easier to ask that question when you’re in scenarios where it isn’t very easy to tap away with your thumbs to ask the question.”

Usage: Brad says ChaCha via mobile is “already within the top twenty in terms of volume” in the U.S. (of all premium text services). “We believe, in the next few months, we’ll actually have the number one volume on any premium text service in the U.S., so we’re growing extremely fast.” So what do people want? Pretty much everything. “We did a big launch of that with the Sundance Film Festival, where we were the official text answer service of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City this year. And one thing that was really interesting to see was that people showing up at Sundance would start out using the service to ask when films started, what actors were in what films. And we found over the course of the event, only about seven percent of their questions ended up being about Sundance; 93 percent of their questions ended up being about all kinds of other things.”

Blasting past Google?: “Even today, our service is so much more useful on a mobile device than anything that Google or Yahoo can offer.” So, when ChaCha’s Scott Jones says ChaCha can “blast right past Google on the mobile device,” he means it. “In terms of the ease of use and the power of access to information, and the empowerment we bring to all users of mobile devices, I believe right now, we offer a much better experience [than Google]….Obviously, Google has a text service where you could try to put in a question. For the most part, if you ask a question in normal, conversational English, it’ll come back and say I don’t understand your question. You can kind of get weather and stock quotes and things like that if you know the syntax that they require.”

Future focus: “Now when you move over to more of the directory assistance world, we are definitely in the mix in that world as well, and working very closely with carriers to align with enhancing their directory assistance capabilities.”
Mobile advertising: Brad hinted at this in his blog – and walked me through an example. “Imagine a scenario where you call and you ask for the five-star restaurant in a certain town, and we’re able to not only inform you of what that is, but actually follow through with helping to set up your reservation, for example….Those are the areas where we see a really huge value for our users that also obviously also has commercial value to a number of different businesses. And that’s what we’re trying to match perfectly.

Thanks, Peggy!

ChaCha’s Official Announcement:

LAS VEGAS, April 1, 2008 — From the scoop on the hottest martini bar on the Vegas strip to advice on where to buy the cheapest gas in Manhattan, ChaCha’s ingenious new 1-800-2-ChaCha (800-224-2242) mobile answers service allows mobile phone users to ask an extensive range of questions in conversational English while on the go — and the free answers are texted back within minutes.

The online and mobile search company is announcing its free new voice service today at the CTIA Wireless 2008 global convention in Las Vegas.

You can ask ChaCha almost anything:

· How much sodium is in a McDonald’s Big Mac?

· What hotel in downtown Austin has a business center?

· Who won the last Boston Marathon?

· Where can I get the cheapest gas in Orlando, Florida?

· Who stars in the new movie “21″?

ChaCha’s valuable new service instantly routes each question to a human guide — dramatically expanding the questions you can ask well beyond simple phone numbers or addresses. The guides utilize powerful tools to search the Web and quickly return a succinct, relevant answer in a text message with a Web reference link.

“On mobile devices, traditional 411 has been the only easy to use option and it is limited to the basics of only finding a phone number or address,” explains ChaCha CEO Scott A. Jones. “More recently, desktop search engines have attempted to enter the mobile market by forcing users to enter a restricted query with their thumbs on a tiny keypad in a specific way, which causes most people to find other ways of meeting their information needs, such as calling a friend or waiting until they get to a computer, or, worse yet, making less-informed decisions. Using ChaCha is like having thousands of informed friends available by phone to help answer your questions 24 hours a day.”

Moreover, ChaCha works on any mobile phone — from simple flip phones to sophisticated smart phones — with no voice recognition prompts or menus to muddle through.

“With our innovative combination of human intelligence and sophisticated technology, ChaCha’s mobile answers service does the work for you,” explains ChaCha President Brad Bostic. “Another groundbreaking feature is that you can easily reply with follow-up questions, as you might do in a conversation, further demonstrating how superior our new service is compared to 411 or algorithmic search engines.”

ChaCha’s new voice capability further expands upon its award-winning text service launched in January of this year. After only two months of deployment, ChaCha demonstrated at the “My Search is Better than Your Search” competition at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Manhattan that it dominates the mobile search arena by taking top prize for its service’s technical efficiency, relevance and practical functionality.

Additionally, ChaCha was ranked as the “No. 1 Alternative Search Engine” in February — beating out hundreds of companies — by Charles Knight of the blogging network, ReadWriteWeb. Last month, out of 70 promising start-ups presenting at Dow Jones’ “Web Ventures”, ChaCha was selected as a “Top Ten” company by VentureWire’s judges.

“ChaCha’s new voice capability pushes the boundaries of mobile 411 beyond its historical name and address limitations,” says Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence and the Program Director for Local Mobile Search. “It represents a next step in the evolution of the industry from directory assistance to voice search.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Innovations, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.