Search engine startup ChaCha pitched at the the Under the Radar conference being held today at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus today. Panelists consisted of Canaan Partners' John Balen, Lockergnome.com's Chris Pirillo and Forum Nokia Americas' Doug McMillan.

ChaCha is a search engine that taps into the knowledge of humans rather than algorithms. They pay experts to answer searchers' questions. I've summed up the question and answer period between ChaCha CEO Scott Jones and the judges. Some are quotes and others are my best attempt at paraphrasing.

Pirillo: Your actual solution seems to be a departure from original idea of finding answers from friends.
What's most relevant are domain specific experiences. When I needed help with my wisteria plants, I got advice from an expert. I was connected to someone who had domain specific knowledge

Pirillo: How do you trust these experts?
Because we have a trust network and we pay them. This trumps Web 2.0. I like electoral college better than a general election. If the experts don’t give great results they don’t work for us anymore.

Pirillo: What if I don’t have a lot of friends?
What if I can connect you to thousands of domain specific experts with authority and credentials in our system. That’s what we’re building.

Nokia: if we look out a few months and you have a brand and you have guides that aren’t given good results and pull them off the payroll, how do you protect your brand. How do you prevent someone from getting a bad guide who then goes and tells all their freinds about it?
We’re trying to manage expectations and we’re going after guides that have proven credentials.

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Etay Gafni
Under The Radar

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