ABOUT ISEARCH
1. What is ISearch?
ISearch is a service that mobile users can use to find answers to any question via mobile email. When you post a question to ISearch via email (ask@iSearch.com), our ISearch workers will surf the web to find the answer for you. ISearch workers are users who are being paid to search the web on your behalf. ISearch bypasses the need for mobile users to go to the web to find answers to questions as ISearch will send you an email with up to 3 answers to each question you ask. We have not finalized our pricing for each question, however, we expect each question will cost less than $0.25. During this beta-test period all questions asked will be FREE.
2. Who are the people answering my questions?
ISearch has partnered with Amazon.com company, Mechanical Turk (mturk.com), who has a community of users completing various tasks for numerous businesses. By partnering with Mechanical Turk we are paying the Mechanical Turk community (our ISearch workers) to answer your questions. We pay our ISearch workers based on the quality of answers provided, which is why we encourage you to tell us if an answer submitted was “lame”, “junk”, or “great” answer
3. Do I need to create an account to use ISearch and what do I need to sign up?
If you want to ask a question, you will need to create an account. There is no charge for creating an account with ISearch. If you were invited to join ISearch via email from an existing ISearch user, then we have already signed you up using your email address as your login and we’ve given you a temporary password, which you can change online.
4. What type of mobile devices does ISearch support?
You can use any mobile device that supports email protocol such as Blackberry, Palm Treo, and other Wireless PDAs or Smart phones.
5. Do I need to log onto ISearch every time I visit?
In order to manage and access your account you will have to log in every time you visit ISearch.com. By logging in you will be able to manage your questions and change your preferences/settings. To use ISearch from your mobile device, you just have to send an email to “ask@iSearch.com” and type in your question in the subject header. Once our ISearch workers have found an answer to your question, we will send you an email with up to 3 answers to each question you ask.
6. How do I contact ISearch with more questions about ISearch?
Please e-mail us at: feedback@ISearch.com.
7. Where do I find ISearch’s Terms of Service?
Click on this link to read ISearch’s Terms and Conditions.
8. Why is ISearch an invite only service?
We are currently beta-testing ISearch to make sure that we provide you with excellent service. Consequently, we are limiting the number of users who can use the service.
9. How many invites will I receive?
The number of invites you will receive will be based upon how well we are able to provide you with excellent service. Consequently each user will have anywhere from zero (0) to five (5) invites. Periodically we will update each users account with more open invites based on our ability to provide all ISearch users with a high level of service.
10. How can I invite a friend using one of my invites?
You can invite a friend to ISearch.com by using the “invite” command from you mobile device. You just have to send an email to “ask@iSearch.com” and in the body of the email type “invite X” where X is the email address of the person you would like to invite. After your friend receives an email from us, your friend can immediately start using the ISearch service. You also can invite users from the web by clicking on the invite link at the upper right hand corner of the website, assuming you have some open invites left to give.
11. How do I know how many open invites I have?
If you go to ISearch.com and log onto ISearch you will see at the upper right hand corner of the website the # of open invites you have left.
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ASKING A QUESTION
1. When can I start asking questions using my mobile device?
If you were invited to join ISearch via email from an existing ISearch user you can immediatley start asking questions to ISearch by sending an email to “ask@iSearch.com” from your mobile device and type in your question in the subject header. We have already signed you up using your email address as your login and we’ve given you a temporary password, which we have sent to you via email. You can change your temporary password online by going to ISearch.com.
2. How do I submit a question via email using my mobile device?
You can submit a question to ISearch as if you were composing an email. You should address the email to “ask@iSearch.com”. You then type in the question in the email Subject Header, after which you simply send the email. You do not have to type in a “?” at the end of the question. Once we receive the email, our ISearch workers will take your question and begin to surf the web to find your answers. Once our ISearch workers have found an answer we will email you each answer in a separate email. Please do not forget to vote for each answer provided. Click here to learn how to vote for each answer. The more you vote the better we will be able to answer your questions.
3. How do I submit a question via SMS using my mobile device/phone?
(Coming Soon)
4. Can I ask a question via the web?
You can log onto ISearch.com and ask questions into the mobile device image on our home page. Any questions that you ask on the web will be treated the same way as if you had asked the question on your mobile device.
5. Can I ask a question from my email client (e.g. Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook)?
You can ask a question to ISearch from anywhere you can send an email message so long as you’ve registered the email address you are sending the question from with us. You can change the email address where you want ISearch to send your answers to by going to Manage Email Addresses from the homepage. Any question that you ask on the web will be treated the same way as if you had asked the question on your mobile device.
6. What questions can I ask?
You can ask any question that can be answered with words or numbers and can be found on the web. Our ISearch workers are not necessarily experts in the field related to your question, but they are pretty good in locating information on the web. If the answer to your question is online, chances are pretty good they’ll find it. Keep in mind that ISearch is not a substitute for professional advice or services, nor will we knowingly provide answers to assist in illegal activities. We reserve the right to delete or reject questions on a case-by-case basis if they do not comply with our editorial policy and guidelines for “Proper Use,” as specified in our Conditions Of Use.
ISearch discourages and may remove questions that:
• request private information about individuals
• want assistance in conducting illegal activities
• are meant to sell or advertise products
• refer or relate to adult content
• are homework or exam questions
• seek specific information about ISearch (email feedback@nowow.com instead)
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ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS
1. How will I get my answers back?
We will send an email message to you for every answer that we get back from our ISearch workers (i.e. workers from the Mechanical Turk community). You will receive anywhere from 1 to 3 answers back from our ISearch workers, each sent in a separate email message. .
2. What if a question doesn’t have a clear answer?
Some questions simply don’t have clear, straightforward answers that can be answered through an online search or through another reference source (e.g. “Which is prettier – blue or green?”). In such cases, ISearch workers will attempt to provide links to useful background information on the question.
3. How does ISearch make sure I will get high quality answers?
ISearch has partnered with an Amazon.com company, Mechanical Turk (mturk.com), who has a community of users completing various tasks for numerous businesses. By partnering with Mechanical Turk we are paying the Mechanical Turk community (our ISearch workers) to answer your questions. We pay our ISearch workers based on the quality of answers provided, which is why we encourage you to tell us if an answer submitted was “lame”, “junk”, “like” or “great” answer. We take those ratings and keep track of the performance of each ISearch worker in the Mechanical Turk community. If an ISearch worker’s rating falls below an acceptable level, he or she will no longer be allowed to participate as an ISearch worker. While our ISearch workers will do their best to help answer every question, some questions simply don’t have clear answers (e.g., “Should I breakup with my girlfriend?”). It’s also possible the answer to your question is simply not available. If you do receive an answer, but are not satisfied with it, you have the option of resubmitting your question for a new set of answers for free, you can apply for a refund (when we start charging for each question), , and/or you can give a specific ISearch worker a poor rating by flagging any specific answer as “lame” or “junk”. ISearch actively monitors the performance level of our ISearch workers and uses your ratings as a method to remove poor or abusive ISearch workers.
4. How do I sign up to become an ISearch worker?
You can become an ISearch worker by simply going to our partner’s site, www.mturk.com. Once you’ve signed up with our partner, Mechanical Turk, you need to just find ISearch questions on their work board.
5. How do I rate an answer from my mobile device? What other commands can I send via my mobile device?
You can give commands to ISearch from your mobile device via email. Commands include rating an answer, buying more questions (coming soon), resubmitting a question, etc. To send a command from you mobile device simply reply to any ISearch email and type the command in the body of the email. Mobile Device Commands:
lame – this tells ISearch that this answer was not satisfactory. We will penalize the ISearch worker for submitting a lame answer. If an ISearch worker gets enough “lame” votes, they will no longer be able to answer questions on ISearch.
junk – this tells ISearch that this answer was completely inappropriate and/or was spam. Any ISearch worker who has received too many “junk” votes will no longer be able to answer questions on ISearch.
like – this tells ISearch that you liked this answer. ISearch will keep track of the number of “like” votes each worker receives to measure performance and ensure that you will get high quality answers back from us.
great – this tells ISearch that this answer was a great answer and very helpful to you.
resubmit- if you are not satisfied with the initial set of answers (you will receive up to 3 answers) you can resubmit the question to get another set of answers for free. You can only resubmit a question once.
invite x – if you want to invite a friend to ISearch and you still have open invites to give out you can send an email to “ask@iSearch.com” and in the body of the email type “invite X” where X is the email address of the person you would like to invite. After your friend receives an email from us, your friend can immediately start using the ISearch service.
help – this will email you a list of all the available commands you can use from your mobile device.
6. What if I don’t like the answers I got? What can I do?
If you receive an answer and are not satisfied with it, you have the option of waiting for another answer to be submitted by a different ISearch worker (up to a maximum of 3 answers). If you get 3 answers to your question you should be able to determine what the right answer is to your question, i.e. if two of your answers are the same and the third one is different than most likely the two answers that were the same is probably more right than the one answer that was different. If you are still not satisfied with your answers, you have a few options:
• You can resubmit your question for a new set of answers for free by replying to the original question and typing into the body of the email “resubmit”. You will be allowed to resubmit a previously asked question for free one time only for each question.
• You can give a specific ISearch worker a poor rating by flagging any specific answer “lame” or “junk”. You can do this on your mobile device by going to the email with the poor answer and sending a reply with the text “lame” or “junk” in the body of the email message. ISearch actively monitors the performance level of our ISearch workers and uses your ratings as a method to remove poor or abusive ISearch workers.
8. Can I reward the ISearch worker who gave me a great answer?
Yes. You will have the option of flagging any answer as “great” answer. You can do this on your mobile device by going to the email with the great answer and sending a reply with the text “great” in the body of the email message.
9. How many invites will I receive?
The number of invites you will receive will be based upon how well we are able to provide you with excellent service. Consequently each user will have anywhere from zero (0) to a hundred (100) invites. Periodically we will update each users account with more open invites based on our ability to provide all ISearch users with a high level of service.
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YOUR PRIVACY
1. What is ISearch’s Privacy Policy?
You can find this policy at http://www.iSearch.com/iSearch/privacy.jsp.
2. Will my question and answer be publicly viewable?
Yes. Your question and the corresponding answer will be posted on the web and viewable by the public. However, your personal information and identity will never be posted with your question, so your privacy is protected.
3. Will others be able to see my email address if I ask a question?
No. We do not display anyone’s email address or other form of identity next to any question, comment, or answer. ISearch respects the privacy of our users and we have a comprehensive privacy policy that we encourage you to review at http://www.iSearch.com/iSearch/privacy.jsp.
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PROPER USE OF THE SITE
1. What happens to people who spam ISearch?
Users who spam ISearch will have their account revoked. If you see evidence of spamming, please flag that question as “junk” and we will prohibit the worker who submitted that answer from answering any other ISearch questions.
2. How do I report questionable content to editors at ISearch?
At the bottom of every question page we provide a link to feedback@iSearch.com. We encourage you to use this link whenever you see questionable content posted to the site. In your email, please provide information about the question, its ID number, and the reason you find the content questionable.
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Other example: http://hengine.org/
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a search engine which brings a fundamentally different kind of intelligence to the problem – human brain power.
The current implementation of ChaCha offers a combination of automation and people-powered search. The results can be organized by a vertical, like images or news. Also it has a set of related searches. But by far the most interesting and unusual aspect of ChaCha is its people-powered search.
ChaCha employs people to help users sift through the results. This is cleverly done using a familiar chat interface. When you first come to the site, you are presented with a standard search box. Type in a query and you get back a traditional list of matches. In the testing we did, we found both the performance and quality of the results to be quite good.
But here’s the kicker – if for some reason you are not happy with the quality of the results, you can request a chat session with a (human) Search Guide to help you find what you’re looking for. The Guides get paid for this service – the one I spoke to told me she gets paid $5 per search hour, which is the level for Guides after they reach “pro level”. She also said there are about 10,000 Guides in total, working from home.
Letting the search genie out of the bottle
(note: we grayed over the name of the ChaCha Guide, for privacy reasons)
Here is the transcript of a session. I searched for ‘What is the population of China?’ and then called up the search guide to help. For privacy, I have changed the name of the guide in the transcript to “Search Guide”.
Status: Connected to guide…
Search Guide: Welcome to ChaCha!
Search Guide: Hello
Alex: hey there, how does this work?
Search Guide: Give me just a moment to find your information.
Search Guide: You ask for the information and I find the answers via websites.
Alex: ok, i am actually a journalist trying out the service
Search Guide: Thanks for using cha cha.
Alex: ok, and u yourself use chacha?
Search Guide: I sure do.
Alex: cool. do you get paid for this?
Search Guide: Yes, we get paid $5 per search hour after we reach pro level.
Alex: can you tell me where you based and how many of you are there?
Search Guide: We work from our homes. There are about 10,000 of us.
Alex: are you in United States?
Search Guide: Are these results sufficient?
Search Guide: Yes, I’m in the US.
Search Guide: Is there anything else on this topic I can find for you today?
Alex: Do you search and then hand send me the results?
Search Guide: Yes, we do.
Alex: Awesome – i love this.
Search Guide: Great, glad to hear it.
Alex: the only thing i do not get is your economics
Alex: you get $5 per hour for this?
Search Guide: What do you mean?
Search Guide: Yes, we do?
Alex: ok, thanks!
While I was chatting with the search guide, the results that she selected were appearing on my screen. By comparing these results with the raw results that I got by myself, I could tell that she was looking at exactly the same result set. What the guide was doing was cherry picking stuff for me. If she liked a result, she would press a button and it would appear on my screen, right in the standard result search area. I thought this was slick, but there are three pressing questions:
1. Is this useful?
2. Can this scale?
3. How does ChaCha make money?
Pros and Cons of ChaCha
So who would be using this sort of thing, and why? The ChaCha about section states:
“By searching with a Guide your query is sent to a real person who is skilled at finding information on the internet and knowledgeable on the subject at hand so that you get the few exact results you want, not the millions of results you don’t. ChaCha only provides quality, human approved results.”
Well it does not seem like the tech savvy crowd would be interested. Clearly, people who are not as web savvy are the primary target. The difficulty here though is that these people would still need to know how to operate the computer, navigate to the ChaCha site and then know what to do with the results. The problem with this though is that guides are manually scanning exactly the same result set, so how much better can the outcome be?
According to the guide I spoke to, there are 10,000 people signed up to do this with ChaCha. This is a very large number considering the fact that the service is still in beta. In practical terms, it seems like it could work – but it is difficult to imagine how it could be done on the scale of Google.
And how about the economics? $5 per (search) hour seems a lot, considering there are supposedly 10,000 guides. This works out to be hundreds of thousands of dollars per day! So the numbers are quite high and given the fact there are no few ads on the site, the pressing question is how are they planning to make money. We hope that someone from ChaCha comments on this.
Let’s not dismiss this too quickly
All these negatives that we’ve pointed out paint a fairly gloomy picture. But we sense that ChaCha has a few tricks up its sleeve that might not be readily apparent. What seems to be going on is a massive Artificial Intelligence (AI) bootcamp. From the About page:
“The more you use ChaCha, the smarter and faster ChaCha becomes! Because ChaCha indexes all the questions that are asked and associates them with the search engines and resources used by Guides, and the links visited by the users, ChaCha knows where to look and what the best human-approved resources are for each question or topic.”
This is a unique, interesting and clever twist on search. The entire human sifting process is leveraged to train the automated engine to create, in essence, an equivalent of a page rank. With time, ChaCha will get better and better – because more quality search results will be discovered. For this to succeed, the number of guides needs to scale with the amount of new information online – which is not simple. But we have to assume that the ChaCha company has a plan for that. If it works, we’ll get what I think will be the first example of AI training done on such scale.
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here is a People powered search engine that actually works, it is called AnooX (www.anoox.com)
But I think the best human powered search engine is del.icio.us; a lot of people there.. they give you a satisfactory and **sustainable** incentive (=bookmarking) for using your brain to fine-grain their results. ChaCha’s incentive (=$5) does not sound sustainable.
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I think ChaCha would be better off focusing the B2B market.
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The “Ask a Librarian” service powered by AskNow (http://asknow.org) is unique to the state of California.
Other public libraries in the US offer similar services, but may be only available during business hours for that locale.
Examples: The Library of Congress (Washington, DC) has an “Ask a Librarian Service with chat (http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/…. Available chat services are indicated with a “talking bubble”.
Many of these 24/7 “Ask a Librarian” services seem to be powered by QuestionPoint (http://www.oclc.org/questionpo…, which is worldwide… so international users are okay.
The obvious alternative to Cha-Cha’s “human-powered search” is the “Ask a Librarian” service offfered by the the public library system in the US.
There’s no prohibition against international users either, unless you need to pick-up a book at the local library branch.
For the Los Angeles (California, US) Public Library System (http://lapl.org), the “Ask A Librarian” service is powered by AskNow.org (http://www.asknow.org/portal.c….
I use this service often for both work and personal stuff. A couple of quick caveats:
1) Is it Web 2.0 sexy? Hell no. But in terms of a quality research tool, there’s no better resource than a professional librarian.
2) Browser compatibility may be an issue for some, as the back-end systems for the “Ask A Librarian” service in diffrent locales may be powered by varying vendors. Thus far I’ve had no real browser problems anywhere in the US, using one of the Mozilla variants or Safari (IE isn’t available on Macs).
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I day or two ago I was sent an email with a registation link and the details in getting started with ChaCha as a guide. To be honest I’m still thinking about whether I would like to become a guide for them or not.
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guess the question is, how many people need their hand held while they search? Unless I’m looking for something complicated, it probably takes more time to interact with a human guide than to simply do the search myself. It’s an interesting idea, but the question will be if people really want a companion to do the searches for them.
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Part Wikipedia, part Yahoo Answers and part About.com, ChaCha is a new search engine with a compelling hook – real-time results from human beings. The site launches (in “Alpha”) today and offers users two ways to search: traditional algorithmic results or help from live “guides.” Users interact with guides via an embedded instant messaging window in the search results page.
Brad Bostic, co-founder of ChaCha, said that the site had lined up about 2500 guides at launch: college students, retirees, stay-at-home moms and others “who are online all day anyway.” But not just anyone can become a guide apparently; you have to be “sponsored” (invited by an existing guide) and work your way up a hierarchy consisting of four levels.
New guides are considered “apprentices” and are matched with areas of personal interest and expertise. New guides also have mentors, more experienced guides who monitor their work. Apprentices cannot interact with the public initially and must pass several tests for speed, quality and accuracy. If they meet these requirements they become “pros.”
Pros then get the chance to interact with the public and will be paid (US$5 per “search hour”). After pro come two other levels: “master” and ultimately “elite.” Elite-level guides make US$10 per search hour. But once you become a master you’re eligible to earn 10% of what your “network” makes. Your network consists of those you’ve brought into the “ChaCha Underground” (the community of guides).
The challenges of this entire concept obviously revolve around the cost structure and how many guides ChaCha can recruit to make the real-time aspect of this work well. It was clear from my conversation with Bostic, however, that ChaCha has carefully thought through these issues. The company has developed financial and ego-based incentives to recruit and retain guides and various mechanisms to help maximize the quality of their results.
While Bostic believes that most people will get and stay involved because of altruistic reasons (think Wikipedia), the modest financial rewards and four levels of “initiation” (my term) may add additional appeal for prospective guides. As mentioned, there’s also a community aspect. Guides have profiles, featuring their areas of expertise and most recent answers. They’re also rated by users.
The site is ad supported and already has a number of display advertisers as well as sponsored links. The key will be to keep the ad revenues climbing higher than the contractor fees. But Bostic assured me that ChaCha had crunched theses numbers many times. (This ChaCha Underground, if it grows, becomes another social network and advertising vehicle in itself.)
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Sproose is a personalized search engine that combines social networking with peer-moderated rankings giving users the ability to prioritize, customize and fine-tune searches to produce relevant web search results.
Sproose users can effectively categorize and index relevant sites and tailor those for personal or group use. Through collective moderation and scoring users can sort through existing sites to assemble only the most appropriate results.
The results aren’t bad. It isn’t clear where the search results are originally pulled from (I’d guess Google) and the social voting feature on link priority creates a different search experience. Video results come from Blinkx and Sproose indexes over 25,000 sources for news.
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Sproose will be very, very big. Especially if they do cute stuff like let webmasters put “Sproose Search” boxes on their sites, like Google did when it went after Altavista et al… True, they will have to fight spam, just like Google, but that doesn’t mean their model isn’t valid.
I noticed the results are pretty good too. As far as I can tell they are using a combination of Google, Live, Ask, and maybe something else. Their FAQs don’t say how they get the results but each query takes time to process, and the results show excerpts as found on other engines..
I used ChaCha a few times, and the cost to me was:
1. Time. By the time I got my first result, Google, Yahoo and Ask had it for me in triplicate.
2. Relevancy. They continued to ask me questions about why and what and how. Again, this is being coded – whether it be upfront questioning or categorizing results in chunks.
3. Dealing with the ignorant. There’s a psychological sense of frustration that occurs when you’re dealing with someone who just doesn’t get it. It’s one thing if a computer fails, it’s another if you…
What do I like ?
– super clean, very aesthetic layout
– the voting on results I think is fantastic
– so is commenting on results
– it’s like digg whatever topic I want
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looks like something no one will use. no offense, but this has been tried many times in many guises and no one wants to “digg” search results. that’s why google is successful.
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Nothing really wrong or really compelling about the results. I know this kind of idea has some potential, i just think they almost need years morw incubation before launching, or something to make them stand apart on results as opposed to the process.
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So why do I vote again? popular terms will not be influenced at all by my little human vote and will be spammed like crazy–i could write a bot in 10 seconds to spam vote this for my site. But who cares? not enough traction to invest that 10 seconds. and there’s the rub. Damned if it does get traction (via spam). Damned if it doesn’t (via indifference). Next.
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Reminds me a bit of swicki http://swicki.eurekster.com/ only makes more sense. The swicki idea of making custom search hubs is fun but not very useful and the results are confusing.
I don’t think the search results for sproose are powered by google. I tried a few terms from google then sproose. Different results displayed. Some of the data outdated (title and description wise).
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