www.ryankuder.com

If you haven’t heard of ChaCha, they are a human powered search engine focusing on mobile.  To use ChaCha, you enter your question and a human (allegedly) ChaCha guide goes out and searches for the answer for you. The guides are paid a few bucks an hour and work from home.  They used to be a web based human powered search engine, but a cottage industry sprang up of people who asked inane questions to mess with the guides.  TechCrunch LOVES ChaCha.

Recently, ChaCha started taking requests via Twitter.  You just send a question to @ChaCha and a few seconds later, an answer automagically shows up in your Twitter stream with a link to the “source website,” or where the guide found your answer.  Sometimes this works…sometimes hilarity ensues.  So without further ado, here’s today’s @ChaCha hilarity…

It all started when @AustinNealeigh asked, “When are they raising the national minimum wage?

And @ChaCha replied: “@AustinNealeigh answer: Raising the minimum wage now will hurt businesses which will harm the economy. Thanks for using ChaCha.”

And along with their answer, they sent a link to HumanEvents.com who has been “leading the conservative movement since 1944.”  This answer was sent by James W., who claims to be a french translator.  Notice that James didn’t answer the question.  The article is an opinion piece about why raising minimum wage is bad.

I found this funny and a bit odd that ChaCha was taking a political position on minimum wage, so I told people about it, as I’m prone to do.  And since I started my tweet with “@ChaCha,” they replied to my non-question, as they are prone to do.  Beth, who specializes in body piercing and anxiety symptoms among other things, sent me this personal reply:

@ryankuder answer: This is true. http://chacha.com/u/euzunpxn

And to back up her assertion that raising the minimum wage will hurt businesses which will in turn hurt the economy, she sends me a link to a Baltimore Sun blog post about…wait for it…Obama blowing his nose.  Well done, ChaCha!  Bravo!  Nice work!  Really, there’s not a lot more I can add to this.  ChaCha just wins.

And in case you were curious, on July 24, 2008 the federal minimum wage will increase from $5.85 to $6.55.