The president of Indiana University has made a proclamation that all university employees, including librarians, will use the privately owned search engine ChaCha as the default search tool.
Come Monday, no more IU searches will be powered by computer-driven Google. Only by people-powered ChaCha. Later this month, IU will draft hundreds of librarians and information technology employees to be “credentialed” ChaCha guides for the university’s Web sites.
From the coverage it sounds like only ChaCha will be available and that librarians and staff will be actually working as unpaid guides. The move if successful will increase the “guide” pool for the search engine that relies on humans to generate search results.
They’re calling it a “strategic alliance for research, development and services for the next generation of Internet search tools and practices.†If they simply put a ChaCha search box on every page that’s one thing but are they going to block Google or Yahoo, or redirect access to them? I hope information access at IU isn’t being serverly restricted, coopted, and privatized.
By the way, Have you ever noticed that using ChaCha search engine without logging in, the web results are sprinkled with sponsored links. Also they are not formatted any differently than regular results.
[Via the IndyStar]
