Almost 14 months have passed since I started this thread. ChaCha is still in beta. Like a lot of search engines with hopes of becoming the next Google, it hasn't made it there yet. At the moment it isn't even close. But who knows what the future might hold.
The ChaCha Underground that I mentioned is now found under Results.
The guides are for people who are lazy as well as those who might not be all that good at conducting searches and those having trouble finding something that is difficult to find. The guides seem to be doing a better job than they were 14 months ago but some still aren't as good as one would want them to be. For many people using the guides is much slower than it would be for them to do their own searches. One problem for the guides is a lot of people just want to play jokes on them with prank searches.
ChaCha also has search available without the use of guides. However there isn't a very large percentage of people who are using ChaCha.
Indiana University has replaced Google with ChaCha. Indiana University librarians and students will now use ChaCha at the Indiana University website. Also students and librarians are encouraged to be unpaid guides. Many people at Indiana University (IU) aren't pleased with the ChaCha selection because they don't feel it was made for the right reasons.
The move to ChaCha was done by new Indiana University president Michael McRobbie, who is a friend of ChaCha founder Scott Jones and Michael McRobbie had been on the ChaCha Board of Directors until shortly before this ChaCha decision was made at Indiana University.
There are sponsored links with the ChaCha results and it is obvious they are trying to make themselves look like Google.
ChaCha says they have some plans for the future. Time will tell what the future holds for ChaCha.
ChaCha: search + brainpower | Simple Access, Better Answers