Who invented sunflower-seed butter? What is the capital of Brazil? Is there a P. F. Chang’s in La Jolla?¹

For brief moments over the past month, I cared intensely about the answer to each of these questions. And then, after firing off a pithy text message, I didn’t. My fingers twitched and sweat beads formed on my forehead, like I was a game-show contestant poised to win the $25,000 jackpot if only I could find some delicious P. F. Chang’s Chinese food in the greater San Diego area.

The low-stakes truth is that I was a “guide” for ChaCha, the human-powered search engine, and I was being paid 20 cents a pop to obsess over questions that wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise.

ChaCha works on a concept so simple and dreamy that it belongs more to the 1999 boom era than the jaded Web 2.0 epoch. A ChaCha user texts a question to 242242 (which spells CHACHA on a phone keypad) or calls it in to (800) 2-CHACHA.² A ChaCha “Guide” on the other end then searches the Internet and texts back a suitable answer, usually within three minutes. It’s Google, de-automated.

In a world accustomed to the terse language and instant gratification of a Google search, who would bother posing their questions to a slow, fallible human being? And what would they ask? Do people treat the fleshy search engine differently from the soulless, computerized version? I signed up as a ChaCha guide to find out—and to get me some of that sweet $0.20-a-query scratch!

whats the most popular color

One of the basic tenets of improv comedy is that “No” is not an acceptable response. In an improv scene, you’re supposed to imbue yourself with the spirit of “Yes” or, even better, “Yes and….” Always accept what your scene partner gives you and add something to it. “No” stops a scene; “Yes, and” makes it more exciting. Talk to a longtime improv comic about their craft—or get within 20 feet of them, really—and they’re likely to tell you how the spirit of “Yes, and” informs not only their art but also their lives. ChaCha operates on the same principle.

Becoming a ChaCha guide is a bit more difficult than typing in your email and choosing a password, but not by much. ChaCha puts a scholarly face on its guides, boasting that they are “brainiacs” and “smarty-pants” who navigate that shadowy realm the kids call “cyberspace.” Smarty-pants. Uh-huh. As you might imagine, the only item you really need on your résumé to become a ChaCha Guide is some mid-level Google-fu.

Nonetheless, before being allowed to bear the ChaCha standard, you must prove yourself in a series of trials. Trial the first: an informational video. The ludicrously named Esther Friend, VP of Guides, narrates a welcome video filled with vapid PR tidbits. It’s the type of video that media-relations interns burn to CD and stuff in a media packet, never to be viewed again. I let it play—fearful that the ChaCha masters could tell if I clicked “next page” before the video was over—and made myself a sandwich.

Fans of Saved by the Bell already know what came after the boring informational video that I ignored: a test on the boring informational video that I ignored. I had visions of failing and being relegated to the transcription group—this is where ChaCha puts recruits who are capable of working a mouse and keyboard but can’t manage much else. The transcribers type up messages left on the ChaCha 800 number and then pass the requests along to the “real” guides. These serfs of the ChaCha universe only get a nickel per query, and their job is really boring. Nobody wants to be a transcriber.

I had no reason to worry. The tests were common sense, for the most part. Don’t insult the customer. Don’t answer abusive questions. Put a professional face forward. Et cetera.

There were, however, some non-intuitive nuggets to come out of the training process. For instance, “I don’t know” is never an acceptable answer. “Mission #1: Give the InfoSeeker the answer to his/her question,” demands a Search University training document.³ It sounds like a simple, noble aim, until you get a question like this:

who is delilah snuffwouter

I made up the name “Delilah Snuffwouter” for this piece, but the name I actually was asked to research by this ChaCha user was no less strange or obscure. It generated no hits on any search engine. I frantically leafed through dozens of “Search University” PDFs for guidance. “Answers taking longer than 3 minutes risk leaving customers unsatisfied,” they scolded. I had to punt:

Delilah Snuffwouter appears to be a very private person — there are no results for her on any search of the net!

A little too cute, right? I was desperate.

Each response has to be accompanied by a source-citation URL that the user can follow for more information. My citation for this query was a blank Google results page. It was a bullshitty way of saying “I don’t know.” A couple of days later, I got an email from ChaCha QC, the guide gestapo. “After a Quality Control review,” said the form letter, “one or more of your recent responses were found to be outside the guidelines for source citation.”

There is a ChaCha-approved trick for handling Delilah Snuffwouters—the essence is that you have to make your bullshit slightly more elaborate—but guides have to contend with countless other, more vexing unanswerables:

what is the most popular color

best basketball player

Are choir people nerdy?

I learned by looking at other guides’ answers and browsing the internal ChaCha forums that if you can’t provide the answer, any good-faith answer will do. I don’t know what the most popular color is, but here’s a little tidbit about the most popular color among U.S. automobile buyers. Choir people come from all walks of life, but here’s some advice about dealing with cliques. And so on. There was a moment of serendipity when I realized that it was, in fact, quite energizing to accept that whatever question was asked, I would provide an answer. The job became easier. That’s the “yes” part.

The “and…” came when I added what ChaCha calls “magic.” That’s their precious catch-all for bits of personality you might add in if you have space left after your answer. (Since the reply goes by SMS, you’re limited to 160 characters in theory, but you get less space in practice because the message also has to include your source link). ChaCha encourages you to include a closer like “Have a great day!” or “Thanks for using ChaCha!”

There’s rarely room for such verbosity, so I followed the lead of other guides and adopted shorter sign-offs like the nonsensical “ChaCha on!” or, for sports requests, “Go team!” I got more creative on occasion, capping my response to a search for nearby Italian restaurants with “Try the linguine!”

At first, I hesitated to dabble in this supposedly magical small talk. I figured that the people-powered aspect could not capture the imagination of users like ChaCha marketing hoped it might. ChaCha may be a human search engine, but it’s still a search engine. People are looking for information, right? Well, yes. And…

r u really a person

In the 1957 office comedy Desk Set, Katharine Hepburn heads the research department at a TV network where efficiency expert Spencer Tracy is overseeing the installation of EMERAC, a marvelous new computer. EMERAC appears destined to replace Hepburn and her team of librarians, who research esoteric questions like “What are the names of Santa’s reindeer?” and “How much does the earth weigh?” for the network’s productions. The climax of the movie is a frenzied showdown between the sprightly librarians and the mainframe. Spoiler alert: The humans win.

Either the 51-year-old Desk Set was remarkably prescient or search engine frustrations are not so modern as popular conception would have it. EMERAC’s seams start to show when it gets a question about the Watusi tribe. The machine churns and spits out an irrelevant review of the film King Solomon’s Mines because it contains the keyword “Watusi.”

Because of such pitfalls inherent in keyword searches, the grail of “natural language search” pops up from time to time. Any number of startups have laid claim to the technology, and most have faded away.

AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com) strongly implied during their early years that they could parse natural language search. AskJeeves.com publicity encouraged users to type in full sentences, the way you would pose a question to a fellow human. This was some clever obfuscation. The truth was that AskJeeves.com’s language-parsing was low-tech (or high-tech, depending on your point of view): they had a team of editors compiling result sets for the most common questions. If your question hadn’t been covered by an editor yet, AskJeeves.com reverted to, surprise, a standard keyword search.

The latest hope for natural-language search is Powerset, a startup that Microsoft purchased in early July. “Powerset’s goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language,” according to the company’s about page. For the time being, Powerset is limiting their search to Wikipedia, reasoning that some playtime in this limited but diverse sandbox will allow them to hone the technology for the greater web.

The Powerset homepage invites you to try some pre-selected natural language queries and watch the site find “articles related to the meaning of your query.” One of the provided examples (as of this writing) is “where do hurricanes hardly ever happen.” When I click on it, Powerset churns and spits out an irrelevant article about the film My Fair Lady because it contains the phrase “hurricanes hardly ever happen.”⁴

Don’t blame me; I wasn’t trying to fool the machine. They told me to ask it that!

As it was in the mid-20th Century, a person remains the best natural-language search engine. I found that many ChaCha users, though, were unwilling to accept this reality. Having seen gimmicks like AIM chatbots and AskJeeves, customers were hesitant to believe that a company would invest in notoriously unreliable human technology. There has to be a clever script behind the curtain, they reasoned. Hence tire-kicking questions like:

r u really a person

The skeptics didn’t surprise me. The believers, the people who accepted that they were corresponding with another person, they were the ones that threw me, as they posed questions I didn’t expect. My greatest stroke of naïveté as a fledgling guide was to envision myself as the ultimate natural-language search engine. I was going to be the chipper, professional front end to a vast store of useful information, the Desk Set Katharine Hepburn, model 2.0.

Of course, I wasn’t a search engine or a librarian. Those models were meaningless here. With ChaCha, there’s a human on the other end, you have complete anonymity, and you can ask any question you want. And I expected people to ask about state capitals.

Should I leave my bf coz he smk pot

Some of them did ask about state capitals, of course. Most did not. Many users asked about sex, this being the Internet and all. The Search University primer on “Prank, Joke & Sexual Queries (PJS)” was one of the first bits of required reading, and it proved handy as I fielded a litany of “How do u get a girl to do anal sex,” “what is a spinchter,” and so on. The PJS were annoying, but most were easy to answer, so I fired off a reserved, professional reply and moved on.⁵

The puerile stuff was obviously part of the job. People like to type naughty words into computers, and none of it offended my delicate sensibilities. Then this came up on my ChaCha console:

Should I leave my bf coz he smk pot

Was this another prank? Could’ve been. And it could have been a query with heart, with genuine concern. I veered to the latter interpretation, eager to help. Was I qualified to advise her on this topic? As “Savage Love” columnist Dan Savage has observed, the only qualification one needs to give advice is being asked for it. So, no, I wasn’t qualified, but yes, I was.

I was thrilled to encounter a moment of genuine human contact amid the crassness. For an instant, a sterile information exchange became warm and personal. Then I remembered the clock. I had two minutes and change to enlighten my friend, within a 160-character limit, on her delicate social quandary. I found a relationship advice site to act as a decoy “source,” typed up my advice to her (talk to him about it, not me), and said goodbye forever. ChaCha forbids asking follow-up questions, and even if she sent another message, one of the other thousands of guides would receive it. Conversations are impossible.

I came to resent this tyrannical brevity. Many guides find the PJS the most annoying aspect of the ChaCha experience; I found the meaningful queries more exasperating.

Is mine the one true church?

Gosh, I don’t know what your church is, or how I would answer that, it’s an interesting question, but I’m running out of space, so: mayb?

What are good things to do with a two month old baby?

How do I tell her I like her

Why is ann being such a bitch

Touched yet frustrated, I fell into a habit of unconsciously assigning a backstory to these tantalizing glimpses of scandal flashing across my console. Sometimes it was pretty easy. The user asking questions like “When the mineral feldspar reacts with carbonic acid, what is formed?” doesn’t recognize that cheating on one’s geology homework degrades one’s moral fiber.

“How do I get rid of hiccups?”—I conjectured that this person had a case of the hiccups.

Many questions, though, lent themselves to a more engaging sort of daydream. When a user asked me how long cocaine stays in your system, I imagined the star quarterback making a dumb one-time mistake at a party. He had to pass a drug test before the big game, and he needed my shakily researched wisdom to save the day!

My working theory became that people are just looking for a friend. They’re lonely and reaching out for companionship, however fleeting. Suddenly, even the jackass-y sex queries seemed reasonable. “How many times a day do you masterbate,” asked one fellow. Perhaps he has an addiction problem and wants to compare himself against a societal benchmark, I reasoned. Because who would joke about a topic like masturbation? Not my customers!

“What is cunniligis?” asked another user, who I presumed to be a clumsy first-time lover preparing for that special night. Trying to please your partner, I mused, is such a sweet thought.

A few days after I stopped answering queries regularly, I thought back on all my lavish narratives and wondered whether people were trying to feel companionship so much as I was trying to feel useful.

how much do they pay u?

The ChaCha Guide software has a View Recent Activity feature that’s good for some voyeuristic thrills. The idea is that you look back on user’s searches to provide them a seamless experience. When they text “Tell me more,” you can look in their history to find out what the heck they want to know more about.

I liked the recent activity window because I got to see how other guides answered questions. Observing other guides is a great way to pick up tips, learn ChaCha style, blah blah blah.

I used it to find bad answers and laugh at them, solidifying my self-image as the greatest guy sitting at a computer typing stuff into a search engine IN THE WORLD. Not the healthiest exercise, I concede.

Recent activity logs revealed that there were two camps of ChaCha guides. Most made a good-faith effort to provide users with an informative answer. The rest, like the worst overseas call-center jockeys, only wanted to get rid of their customers as fast as possible, pocket their 20 cents, and move on to the next.

Given that there was little financial motivation for being a model ChaCha employee, I was surprised at how few guides fell into the latter, speed-racer category. I estimate that more than 90% of the answers I saw were excellent. Still, crummy “I don’t know” answers or sloppy cut-and-paste jobs were not so rare. When I started researching this piece, I expected the lack of a reward system for quality work would top my list of criticisms. Then, a few weeks ago, ChaCha addressed the problem—in the worst way imaginable.

“Introducing Pay-For-Performance!” cried the latest hip-hip-hooray missive to the ChaCha guide mailing list. ChaCha is now basing compensation on guide performance! Yay! “Top Guides” who complete more than 300 high-quality searches per week will get paid 20 cents per search, same as before! Yay. Everybody else will only get 10 cents per search! Yay…?

Esther Friend fired up her Handycam to record a breathtakingly unconvincing recitation of corporate B.S., which was subsequently posted to her Guide Blog. I’ve put a copy up on YouTube, but I’ll post a transcript if it gets yanked:

Watch her eyes go dead as she tells guides a select few of them will have the “opportunity” to get paid the same amount they were already getting paid. It really is a strange video; the blank backdrop and her seeming state of duress give the impression that she was hurried into a back room and told to read the words the angry man held up in front of the camera.

As ChaCha launched an all-out effort to insult the intelligence of its employees, the internal forums went ablaze with rage, concentrated in one mega-thread, “$0.10 to ANYONE not making top guide list,” which as of this writing contains more than 11,000 replies. The forums provide insight into the demographics of the ChaCha guide team: a lot of stay-at-home moms, students, part-timers. Tickers from The Ticker Factory are popular as signatures on the forum. Here’s an example:

Paying down a cell-phone bill is a common goal. I also saw “son’s college fund,” “Re-cert for my paramedic license,” and simply “Makin tha monayyy.”

The initial post-“opportunity” anger concentrated on the shock of the pay cut, but as the thread evolved, the frustrating opacity of the evaluation process became topic A.

A guide may only become a “Top Guide” and get that primo $0.20/search rate if they complete a certain number of queries and achieve a 95% “quality” rating. Trouble is, the quality rating is a black box administered by QC, the aforementioned ChaCha secret service—emphasis on the “secret.” Guides can’t check their quality rating, and the criteria for a quality response are undefined. Aside from the occasional email from QC, the only way a guide knows how much she’ll be paid that week is when the weekly Top Guide lists are released on the Official Guide Blog. Under the new system, if you work hard, you receive $0.20 per search, unless you don’t.

It’s a bum deal. As one forumgoer remarked to a guide who defended the new system (he was in a small minority), if you are willing to have your paycheck cut in half on an arbitrary basis, “I’m sure there are plenty of companies that would LOVE to have you.”

It’s folly to take the pulse of a community by way of a message-board threads. Yet it is hard to overlook the message sent by 11,000 mostly furious and often eloquent replies.

ChaCha made some tweaks to the program to placate its employees, but the changes were of little substance and the system remained very confusing. Since everything makes more sense when a cartoon character explains it, Friend added a “Guiding With Gus!” comic to her Guide Blog. I thought I understood the new framework pretty well until I went guiding with Gus. Now I’m lost again.

Click the image for a larger, legible version.

Even if “Guiding With Gus” weren’t such an eye-searing bar-chart of madness, the ChaCha guides, despite their vocal love of the company, would remain unsatisfied. They know the “how.” They’re asking about the “why.” ChaCha guides are trained to believe a good question deserves a good answer. And right now, ChaCha’s future is nothing but questions.

Vintage jewelry open today near 2 line NYC?

Pay-For-Performance was a Trojan horse, although that’s an insult to the Greeks. At least they managed to fool some of the Trojans. No objective observers, including the ChaCha guides, see the new payment plan as much more than a desperate attempt to cut costs.

A couple of dimes per query is a pittance from a guide’s point of view, but it is a lavish expenditure on the corporate level. ChaCha recently emailed its guides after a busy July Sunday to boast that the service had answered 300,000 queries in a 24-hour period. That’s $60,000 in freelance staff costs for a single day, a hefty amount for a young Internet startup.

Since I’m not a wealthy venture capitalist with an urge to invest, ChaCha isn’t going to let me look at their books. The company’s publicly available financial dossier is a bread-crumb trail—some venture capital here, some “1:1 Mobile Marketing Solutions for leading brands and creative agencies to implement strategic, integrated and targeted mobile marketing campaigns” there.

Text “How does ChaCha make money?” to ChaCha, and if the guide is following marching orders, he will reply with this boilerplate: “ChaCha earns revenue from advertising on its website and through its strategic partnerships.” That’s the extent of the candor you’ll get from the company.

One prevailing theory is that ChaCha will someday charge for searches. Because changing a free Internet service to a pay service always works out great. Another is that they'll add advertising. If a user clicks through to the source website cited in a response, the company inserts a text ad, but even ChaCha admits that less than 10% of users do click through. And there are indications that the company is primping itself for purchase by one of the wireless carriers: This April's CTIA wireless show, for instance, saw ChaCha cozying up to AT&T.

The inability of outside observers to understand the company’s financial plan is hardly a guarantee of eventual insolvency. The Pay-For-Performance debacle seems like a red flag, yet it might shake out nicely for the company. After the frenzy calms, it’s possible that the ChaCha guide crew will settle into two camps: busy, well-trained guides who answer the bulk of the queries and casual, adequate guides who help out during high-volume periods at the dime rate. Still, it’s hard to shake that 1999 vibe.

More disturbing than ChaCha’s tea leaves of fiscal ruin, though, are the industry wonks who delight in reading them. “I Love to Hate This Startup,” boasted TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington in March. Farther off the deep end, gossip site Valleywag took it to a bizarre class-warfare place, ranting, “ChaCha’s new mobile service targets the idle rich: People, like [ChaCha co-founder Scott] Jones, who are used to making other people perform menial tasks.”

It’s all of a piece with the cancerous misanthropy that pervades technology journalism.⁶ Everyone seems to agree that natural-language search is a worthwhile pursuit, but rather than put wiling humans to work, we want to see a company expend a quixotic tide of cash trying to teach computers English. It’s Desk Set all over again, except this time everyone’s rooting for the machine.

ChaCha gives us natural language search right now, and you know what? It’s as awesome as we all hoped. On my wife’s birthday, I outsourced the bulk of the planning to ChaCha. Our only plan was to begin the day at the Brooklyn Museum, where the Takashi Murakami exhibit was about to close. From then on, I decided, the day would take place according to Anna’s whims with an assist for ChaCha. At the museum, Anna noticed that an old ring I got her when we were in college was chipping. Maybe we could look for a “replacement” on the way back?

Vintage jewelry open today near 2 line NYC?

ChaCha found a shop just a few blocks from the subway. How about dessert?

High-rated bakery near the jewelry store

Anna got a slice of cheesecake; I had red velvet (AKA “chocolate with gobs of red food coloring”). And so on. We had a fantastic day, and ChaCha did all the legwork. Granted, I could have researched the day’s activities myself on my smartphone, but I wanted to spend time with my wife instead of tapping out Google searches and squinting at touchscreen maps all day. ChaCha made this possible, and it was liberating. Those “idle rich” sure know how to have fun!

When it works—as it does most of the time—ChaCha fulfills one of the unspoken promises of the Internet. You ask a question, the collective information stores on the Web are put to use, and you receive an intelligent answer. Keyword-based engines already do this for much of the information on the net. ChaCha widens the scope of quickly available information. It occupies some of the functional gap between the simple logic of keyword search and the slower, in-depth Q&A of, say, Ask MetaFilter.

We ought to celebrate such an accomplishment, so while I suspect ChaCha won’t last, I hope that it does. Despite the flaws of this particular implementation or management team, the concept is worthwhile. Let programmers keep chasing dreams of fluent computers and magical search algorithms. For the time being, people are still awfully good at answering other people’s questions. Why not let them?