With ChaCha’s vast database of questions and answers, it was only a matter of time before the data was mined for market research. ChaCha has released a study conducted by Frost & Sullivan, which attempts to delve into the dangerous and murky minds of teenagers and young adults in order to gain perspective on brand preferences.

“Teens rely on their mobile devices as their primary media and they ask ChaCha over a million questions each day providing insights on their brand attitudes and actions,” says Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha. “Along with the search query and answer string, ChaCha also has insights into other metrics related to the end user-including demographics, location, and device type.”  Read more... (574 words, estimated 2:18 mins reading time)

Answers search service expands offering to create more comprehensive experience.

You may have used ChaCha to text a question and get a direct answer back a few minutes later. You may have recently used ChaCha to ask your network a question on Facebook. Now, you can use the ChaCha web homepage to look up local businesses.

“Our goal at ChaCha has always been to provide the most accurate and comprehensive answers to our audience. This is a natural extension for our answers service, providing a way for users to instantly find and contact the businesses that interest them without additional navigation or having to deduce which search results link will provide relevant information,” says Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha.  Read more... (238 words, 4 images, estimated 57 secs reading time)

Developers get access to substantial database of answers and search content.

ChaCha has built success as a text-messaging search/answer service. Now, they’re allowing developers to harness the power of all their collected knowledge with the release of three APIs.

“Through our unique SMS- and web-based answer service, we’ve collected hundreds of millions of answers since early 2008. We are excited to put our API into the hands of the developer community to see all of the interesting things they come up with in leveraging our vast database of content,” says Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha.  Read more... (228 words, estimated 55 secs reading time)

App harnesses crowd-sourcing, a departure from their text-based service.

You may know ChaCha as a text messaging-based search service. ChaCha also answers questions on Twitter, so it is fitting that they’ve launched a Facebook app.

Basically, you ask a question and then you can direct it to specific people in your network, post it to your wall, or open it up to anyone.

This type of Q&A search relies on the power of the crowd. Kind of reminds me of Aardvark, which was acquired by Google last week.  Read more... (106 words, 2 images, estimated 25 secs reading time)