ChaCha.com is a new search engine and I've begun to believe that it could, given a fair wind, be a threat to Google—despite the fact that it's still only in beta. The idea that anything could directly compete with Google has been dismissed by most commentators but I personally never bought that idea. I remember the days before Google was a recognised brand (never mind a verb in the language) and most of the surfers I knew swore by AltaVista and swore at just about every other search resource.

Google won by design. It was a much cleaner search page and the signal to noise ratio was much better. In my estimation ChaCha has a similar advantage over Google right now. I used it for several days, and then, believe it or not, I gave up using Google. I'll go to Google if ChaCha fails to find me what I want, but it hasn't happened in a week.

ChaCha is based on a combination of algorithmic search and social networking and, in my experience so far, gives better quality results. Not as good in my opinion as the Del.icio.us search which is not algorithmic at all. (I mentioned in a previous blog posting that Del.icio.us provided quality search results). Unfortunately Del.icio.us wasn't really designed to be a search resource. Instead it majors on saving links—which isn't something I want to do much.

ChaCha is designed to be a search. It returns a maximum of 4 pages (how refreshing) and it searches the web, news, photos, video and audio. ChaCha also does assisted search. If you need to find something, but don't have a clue how to, you can buy the time of someone who really knows the web. I'm not sure that there's a big business in that, but we'll see. (ChaCha pays its assisted search staff, and you can become one if you want).

As a reality check while writing this posting, I did a search on Elvis Presley on Google and on ChaCha. I rate the ChaCha results as much better. I tried “obscure Russian poets”. ChaCha and Google were about even in terms of useful links and signal/noise, primarily because of the absence of Google ads. Nobody has anything to sell that relates to obscure Russian poets except, of course, books by or about obscure Russian Poets—of which there are but few.

Some commentators are already saying that ChaCha (which isn't yet ChaCha 1.0 because it's still in beta) is Web 2.0, because Web 2.0 is deemed to involve social networking—or people as I like to think of them. ChaCha must therefore be Search 2.0 (and believe it or not it has already been called Search 2.0 and if you search for “search 2.0” on a Search 2.0 engine like ChaCha or or even a Search 1.0 engine like Google, ChaCha's name comes up.

Unfortunately I don't buy hype 2.0. (Hype 2.0 is like hype 1.0 except it involved a greater amount of bovine waste). I saw SOA 2.0 mentioned the other day and it made me sigh deeply. ChaCha is actually Search (no version number) just like all the other web searches, but the design is cleaner than Google. Maybe, just maybe, it can make a difference.