Hasta La Gadget!

Tossing and turning at night because your girlfriend left town? Never fear, lonely person. The Deluxe Comfort Girlfriend Body Pillow is here.

This article was written on December 06, 2006 by CyberNet.

I was just using ChaCha to do a search and my mind is still trying to recover from how the service works. I had never heard of the site until tonight but looking around Web makes me think that it has been around for several months already. ChaCha is definitely something that I would show to my friends just because I find it funny that I can have my own personal “search assistant.”

When you use the search box you’ll notice that there are two buttons. The one that you want to use is the “Search with Guide” so that you can actually chat with a real person. I went ahead and tried it and now it really makes me wonder how they could really be making money off of doing this. I asked how many people work for the company and they said over 14,000!?!

The search that I was doing was for “technology news” and as you can see from the results above there wasn’t anything overly special. I assume that they are doing a search themselves and just have to mark a check box for the results that they want to appear.

I went on to do some more technical searches such as “guide to the best Linux distribution” but the results weren’t all that helpful. It seems as though the people working behind the scenes on this don’t have the greatest technical knowledge in the world. After two minutes I only had one result and that was a link to Xandros.com, which is a well known Linux distribution. Then the person said “Thanks for being patient! Rest assured I’m finding the most relevant results for your search.” The final four results ended up being:

1. Xandros
2. Cowichan Valley Linux Users Group
3. Best Linux Distribution of them all
4. LinuxPlanet – Your Guide to Linux Distributions

So they weren’t the best results in the world but I cut the person off so that they could go make some money serving someone else. My guess is that they get a certain amount of money for each rating that they receive, and the amount is dependent on how high the rating is. So if you are doing this just for fun you should rate the person highly to help them out.

Many parts of the conversation will be the same for the different guides that you use. For instance, most of them will welcome you with messages like “Hi there. I will be helping with your search.” The first person that I had, who’s conversation is pictured above, was a little more unique and didn’t use the same phrases that every other guide used.

So is this going to be the next best thing for search engines? Nah, I can typically find the result I am looking for on Google in a matter of seconds and I spent 4-5 minutes waiting for a guide to get me the four Linux sites listed above. In fact, most of the results that I was given could be found in the top 10 returned by Google. The only reason I’ll use this is to show my friends the new search assistant that I have.

Thanks to bdawg923 over in the forum for the tip!

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You might have missed it if you were sleeping, but we broke open a huge treasure trove of leaked Dell mobile devices last night, including the high-end Lightning Windows Phone 7 slider and Thunder Android set. We also got wind of the mid-range Flash and Smoke Android phones, as well as the Looking Glass seven-inch Android tablet, and to round things out we scored more details on the Aero and Streak. Yeah, it was a hell of a night, but we’ve got it all rounded up for you right here, so click on through if you missed anything!

Lightning: the ultimate Windows Phone 7

Thunder: 4.1-inch OLED, Android, Hulu app

Flash: Android Froyo in ‘dramatic’ package

---

Smoke: ‘Like a Pixi but awesome’

Looking Glass: 7-inch tablet with Tegra 2

Streak: Android 2.1 in September

Aero: Spec’d

Dell’s mobile outlook

Dell’s Lightning, Thunder, Flash, Smoke and more: rounding up a storm of mobile leaks originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know what they say about Sprint Premier, the carrier’s VIP program for loyal customers: membership has its privileges. Actually, that’s the tagline for something completely unrelated, but we think it certainly applies here — especially now that we’ve learned that Premier peeps have been invited to apply to win an EVO 4G before the superphone’s general release. It’s not as simple as dropping your name in a hat, though: you’ve got to tell Sprint in at least 150 words what you can do “really fast,” presumably with the goal of making the judges laugh, cry, and generally love you. Ten winners will be notified on May 18 that they’ve been selected, at which point you’ll get a phone, a year of free service, and a job as a blogger on an official Sprint site about your experiences with the handset through August 31 (hopefully using a contest management system that’s compatible with Eclair’s not-always-awesome browser). What’s more, four of those ten will get “long summer weekend” trips to a Sprint 4G-enabled city; it’s not Venice by any stretch, but hey, the EVO’s the important thing here, right?

[Thanks, nickb]

Sprint contest promises ten lucky jerks HTC EVO 4Gs before everyone else originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Poor Gray Powell. He’s the hapless Apple software engineer who left a prototype of the iPhone OS 4.0 (disguised as an iPhone 3G) in a German-beer garden in California, only to have it scooped up, taken apart, and displayed to the world prematurely (kudos to Gizmodo for breaking that story).

But who knows; this all could turn out well for Powell, if he can manage to take advantage of his new notoriety. For example, German airline Lufthansa just Tweeted an offer to fly Powell to Munich, business class no less, to sample some more of the tasty beverage in its homeland. What’s next? “Dancing with the Stars” is calling…

(Thanks to Adrian Richardson for the retweet.)