ChaCha.com Review

Quick View: Imagine being stuck in a traffic jam and wondering what the weather will be like when you finally reach your destination. And whether the resturant you planned to go to will still be open when you get there. Now you can find out. Free. And you can find out just about anything else, any time day or night, free. You just need a cell phone to get all the answers you need.

About ChaCha.com

In the interest of full disclosure, I want you to know that I am a new guide for ChaCha.com. I work behind the scenes bringing answers that people ask to their cell phones. However, before I trained to be a guide, I used the service and that is what I am reviewing here.

ChaCha.com is a unique site. By texting a question to 242242 or by calling 1-800-2ChaCha, you can ask just about any question you want from sports scores to reference to telephone look ups to sexual stuff. Anything but very seriously dangerous things, like how to make a bomb, or very offensive things will be answered. And ChaCha doesn't offend easily, trust me!

This service is completely free and there is no limit to how many questions you can ask in a given day, week, or month. Some people literally have a running dialog with ChaCha guides for hours!

The way it works is pretty cool. A text message will come in and an expediter will send it to a guide to answer. If a person called in a voice question, a translator will type the question and send it to the expediter who will forward it to a guide. From there, the guide will look up the info the person is asking about and provide them with a text answer of 130 characters or less. Users will ALWAYS get the source as well so they can research more when they are on a computer.

This all happens in under five minutes. Many answers will be texted to you within a couple of minutes after you ask them.

To start, go to Chacha.com and sign up. You will never be spammed. All you do is give your cell number and then text YES to ChaCha so they know everything is correct. From there, you can start asking questions and stop whenever you want to. All questions that come in are anonymous. Guides don't know who is asking any question and can't look up that information.

Since this service is relatively new, there are some guides who just won't get the answer you're looking for quite right. ChaCha.com does have quality control people and they work very hard to weed out guides who don't get answers right. They're strict about that, demanding at least a 95% accuracy rate.

If you ask a question that a guide doesn't understand, you will be asked to clarify. If you ask a question that has a lengthy answer, you will be sent the relevant answer with the choice to text MORE to ChaCha.com to continue to get more info.

Each time you send in a question, you get a different guide. Many users think they are communicating with the same guide each time but that is not the case, although getting the same guide twice in a row does happen.

You do have a say as well. If you really hated the guide who answered your question(s) or you really liked him or her, you can send feedback to ChaCha.com letting them know.

Although the system isn't perfect because threre are thousands of guides and some need to be weeded out if they aren't using the approved sources (No Wiki answers or other iffy sites allowed.) or if they're just not getting info to the members fast enough, I think ChaCha.com is pretty darn cool.

I used it to ask for a phone number of business when I was stuck in traffic and I used it to ask the singer of a song whose lyrics were stuck in my head. I was at Denny's with my sister and we just couldn't remember and no one else could either at the restaurant so we ChaCha'd the question. My answer came back in one minute and 44 seconds and it was right on. It saved me from wracking my brain for hours until I got to my computer to look up the singer myself.

I can think of a load of uses for ChaCha.com. You may think you'll never need an answer by text but you never know. Since it is completely free to use, it doesn't hurt to have the number on hand. Teens seem to really like the service and ask everything from reference questions for homework to sexual questions which are treated delicately and professionally.

My Viewpoint

ChaCha.com has a ways to go to get to the place where every guide is right all the time. After all, the entire site is human driven and is reliant of the search skills of people from all over the country. Although guides have to pass several stringent tests, some just aren't as fast or as sharp as others. ChaCha.com is weeding those guides out. I think the service is great though. It's there when you need it and you just might need it when you least expect it. No question is too silly or too hard. The job of the guides is to find your answer if it exists and get it to you fast. I give the site 4 stars. The site has room to grow and I think it will. But even right now, it's a unique service and costs absolutely nothing to use. Can't beat that.

You can read about ChaCha.com on CNN's site here: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/03/01/8401023/

If you have questions about being a guide, you can comment me here. There is info on the ChaCha.com site as well.