ChaCha is a search engine that has two ways to search for websites, news, images, videos, and audio. The first way is to search manually with your own keywords. And the second, more innovative search option is to “Search With Guide.”
This is where someone that works for ChaCha will attempt to try to understand what it is that you are looking for and send you some web site suggestions. However, I noticed on TechCrunch last night that the Search Guides often times seen as unreliable.
People who choose the Search With Guide feature are often time pranksters. Another bad point about ChaCha right now is that the search engine has seen a major traffic drop in the last few months.
Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, investors are still interested in ChaCha. Yesterday ChaCha announced that they have received $10 million in Series B funding.
About $8 million came from Morton Meyerson, former Chairman and CEO of Perot Systems and former President of EDS. The other two million was from Indiana’s 21st Century Technology Fund. The Series A in funding at $6 million came from Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com), Rod Canion (founding CEO of Compaq), and Jack Gill (founder of Vanguard Ventures and partner at Maven Ventures).
“It is rare to find a company offering such a game-changing disruptive equation, even in the context of giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Having had the opportunity to work with the entire ChaCha team, I am especially impressed with the caliber of people driving this groundbreaking company,” said Meyerson. “I am excited for ChaCha’s future potential and think its plan to build upon its human-powered search engine to develop a mobile answers application is brilliant. ChaCha is absolutely in the right place at the right time in a multi-billion dollar industry that is ripe for innovation.”
Meyerson will be joining ChaCha’s Board of Directors. In response, Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha was quoted below:
It is an exciting time for us. We have been building a unique infrastructure that will completely change search as we know it. We will soon unveil the next generation of search that will be the ultimate manifestation of the power of our special human-powered approach. We are thrilled Meyerson is behind our efforts and look forward to his support and input.
ChaCha has a long while to go before it can fully be considered a competitor of Google. And of course, pranksters and the traffic drop are major problems with ChaCha right now.
