Cause of Failure

To understand why ChaCha failed it’s important that you understand how search engines functioned back in 2006 and the early 2000’s. Back in the day, you couldn’t just type one single word and the search engine would find every, single relevant result, including results ‘near you’, as Google can nowadays.



No, you really had to dig deep to find exactly what you were looking for. Search engines weren’t as complex as they are now, and their algorithms certainly didn’t do much of the thinking for you. In many cases, you had to manually search at least 3-4 pages of the search engine before you found a decent result, and even then it wasn’t as tailored to your request as it is nowadays.

If you needed something specific found on the Internet, you needed a librarian who could quickly scout through a number of articles, websites and publications. A lot of the people who really understood how to find information fast on the Internet had a master’s degree because it was so complex and difficult to scour through the tons of information without any proper algorithm.

However, ChaCha soon got stiff competition. Google released its Panda algorithm back in 2011 that virtually put it as the de facto information source on the Internet. If you searched for something on Google, you would be lucky to find results from sites like ChaCha, Ask.com, and Answers.com. They all got pushed further down.

Not only that but at its peak, ChaCha had 55,000 virtual employees. They faced big management problems and there were even some cultural issues they had to take care of as well. The costs of hiring people to manual do research simply became too high, when comparing them with the results you could get from Google. And in addition, it became more difficult for the guides to give proper answers on subjective matters like politics, religion and so on.

Ultimately, hiring people to manually search and give answers to questions wasn’t a sustainable project when Google offered the same thing, only through a simple online search.



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