This site reminds us of an idea we kicked around for awhile. We figured alot of people needed help searching for different types of property. What websites do you search for residential sales, rentals? What sites have commercial office space? Where do you find timeshares and B&B’s? Getaways? We knew them all but not many of the people we interviewed did. It seems everyone had a real estate website niche. But the long tail meant a long list of websites to wade through. What was needed was a group of human beings to do the searching for you or a website that had every type of property. We decided on creating a community which would provide the latter.
Scott Jones & Brad Bostic opted to give the world human search and launched ChaCha. We completely agree with the need for this service. Google is great but 142,00,000 returns for “New York residential real estate” is some haystack. This cries out for someone with a degree in Googleology.
ChaCha, in experimental alpha, has experienced guides who will help you search. You can chat while you do it. Now this can be a great timesaver or a tour of the nine circles of hell. We wanted to find out which but got the message “Please wait…” and so we waited and waited but still no guide. Once the kinks are worked out, we see alot of people on the dance floor.
Good luck guys.
Thanks to John Battelle’s Searchblog for the tip on ChaCha.
Further reading: Comparing the Major Search Tools.
