Indiana U. Libraries, ChaCha Partnership Adds Human Touch to Web Search

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 8/16/2007

Indiana University (IU) has announced a "strategic alliance" with ChaCha.com, an Indiana company that seeks to add a human touch to the web. Under the agreement, the IU/ChaCha partnership will incorporate the "collective knowledge and experience of the university's library and information technology staff" into ChaCha's new search engine architecture, which seeks to combine "machine-based search" with "skilled human guides." The name ChaCha comes from "cha," the Chinese word for search.

ChaCha's vision of "guided search" will offer instant results like traditional search engines, but will also incorporate human expertise to help users focus on the most relevant information. At IU, librarians, information technology staff, and others will serve as guides, available to help the IU community conduct searches through a live instant message chat interface. When IU students and faculty use the service, IU "guides" will vet and "vote upon the instant search results", constantly improving them, as opposed to having results returned solely according to an algorithm. Guides will also be available for live chat. Under the partnership, IU and ChaCha will collaborate on several projects for the fall semester, and the ChaCha service already powers IU's search portal. Patricia Steele, Ruth Lilly Interim Dean of University Libraries, added that the technology could extend the reach of librarians. "This platform will now help us push our expertise outside the walls of the library to where people are working," she noted.