Amazon founder Jeff Bezos backing ChaCha.com, human powered search. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos became a billionaire by using technology to automate a task (buying books) that used to be intensely intra-personal. Now he’s plunked down millions of his own dough to fund a human-powered search engine: Chacha.com. According to this announcement, Bezos’s personal investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, led a $6 million round of funding for ChaCha, with help from Rod Canion, founding CEO of Compaq Computer, Silicon Valley investor Jack Gill of Maven Ventures. So what is ChaCha.com? While the logo might make you think you’ve discovered the Web site for a new condiment, ChaCha is actually a user-assisted search engine that allows searchers to chat with “guides” who help them find what they’re looking for. My chat with my guide, in response to my search “What is SOA” looked something like this: AmandaR: Welcome to ChaCha! Please wait a moment while I search for your results. You: ok. [At this point, three SOA related links pop up: one from Wikipedia, a “What is SOA” whitepaper from Systinet and an article from javaworld.com appear ] AmandaR: Are these results sufficient? You: Hmm… You: Yes. Those will do. My session ends, and I get an opportunity to rate Amanda’s performance (“Excellent” imho). Now, mind you, this is all pretty odd, given the anonymity that most of us are used to enjoying with Google, Yahoo and the like. Of course, as AOL showed us last year, just because nobody’s chatting with you when you search, doesn’t mean companies like Google and AOL don’t look at what you’re looking for. Of course, those folks looking for edible underwear might choose to use ChaCha’s unassisted “ChaCha Search.” And on that score, the company is a step down from Google and the like. In fact, my ChaCha search for “edible underwear” turned up a slew of sponsored links from online vendors of naughty apparel, compared with Google’s, which at least contained this useful Wikipedia entry on the whole edible underwear phenomenon. There’s also some question about how well ChaCha will scale, should the hordes of Google users, speaking a virtual Babel of languages decamp, en masse, for ChaCha’s user assisted search. ChaCha leverages an army of home workers to help searchers with their queries and claims to have 20,000 such guides so far. Certainly the population of “work from home” folks is large — but is it large enough? Still, human powered search engines are all the rage, with companies like Google experimenting with “human in the loop” searching, and socialnetworking style search startups like efamily.com, which launched today at CES. Technology Industry