When I first heard about ChaCha I was amazed: I can text in a question and get an answer in two minutes. I was amazed because sometimes in the course of my research, I have questions that take days to answer or that I can’t answer at all. Imagine getting that down to two minutes. Then I thought maybe they don’t have God-like omniscience and maybe, just maybe, they aren’t set up to do archival research on sixteenth-century Geneva. Maybe you need to focus on simpler questions, more modern questions.

At Pubcon, someone mentioned that you can use the AdWords search preview tool if you want to see where you rank for a given search term without interference from personalized search (if logged into a Google account) or geo-targetting (always on based on your IP number which is sent to Google with every request). This cool tool also lets you see what search results (and ads) you would get in various geographical regions.

So I thought I would do a somewhat whimsical search and searched on bowling deaths. The choice isn’t arbitrary. I usually rank #1 for that search, but I was curious to find out whether that was true even if Google didn’t know who or where I was. And sure enough, there I was, still #1. But ChaCha came up as the number two result with a clear and succinct answer that looked suspiciously familiar. To the question "How many deaths are caused annually by bowling," the ChaCha expert answered

On average there are four bowling deaths due to bowling or bowling equipment each year. Natural deaths while bowling do not count.

Sure enough, the "source" cited was none other than my article. The problem is, my article is satire. The point of the article, to the extent that there was one, was to highlight the idiotic ways in which journalists use statistics, often failing to understand the importance of sample size, significance (as determined by chi-square and such) and so forth.

That article gets a lot of mentions in forums, almost always with a "heh heh" after it. ChaCha is unique in treating it as fact. So I guess that’s the downside of getting answers in two minutes. Maybe I just guessed right in my satirical article? Nah. ChaCha cites its sources, in this case, it’s my very own analysis death rates from bowling.

I wonder how many other examples one could find. Are you a ChaCha user? Have you gotten any tragically bad ChaCha answers? If so, add a comment and tell us about it. I sure hope you weren’t asking for directions!