ChaCha Natural Language SMS mobile search

Rating: ChaCha out of here

by Bena Roberts

I am actually quite surprised at the amount of publicity being thrown at the latest entrant into the mobile search market place. It is ChaCha.

What is it?
ChaCha is founded by Scott Jones and he hopes to provide a natural language SMS search where people can ask real question. So users can type “which petrol station offers the cheapest prices in… ?” or something similar. Questions can be left open ended for an intelligent response.

What else?
As far as I can see the excitement is also due to the fact that voice search will be added to this service (which is still in BETA) shortly.

Anything else?
Um no. I am about as excited about this as I was about Boopsie mobile search which was launched a few months ago. Basically, the best thing about this is the name – which is catchy. At the end of the day – Boopsie is an on device portal and ChaCha is just another SMS search service.

But at the end of the day the competition in this market is already intense with 4Info, askmenow, texperts, Yahoo! answers and a number of free services as well.

I know a large mobile search vendor is about to provide a very similar service to this to a global operator shortly as well.

All in all?
This is a “me too” service. Voice search doesn’t work anyway so its unlikely to make an impact. Natural language search is the best thing about this offer – but mInfo has been offering this for years in China already. mInfo uses IM which is a much faster platform for typing than texting as well.

To be fair, I will still give it a proper test and report back.

Related News:

1. mInfo and Xiaoi deliver natural language mobile search to Chinese instant messenger users
2. mInfo Chinese Mobile Search
3. mInfo acquires Guanxi SMS in its quest to lead the Chinese Mobile Search Market
4. mInfo releases widset version in China
5. Medio and mInfo team to create mobile search and advertising platform for the Chinese market