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Well it only took ChaCha fourteen months to figure out what everyone except ChaCha (and these guys) knew when it launched - search with a human guide as a business idea is ridiculously stupid.

The idea is that you do a search on ChaCha and a real person works with you via a chat interface to give you results. In theory those results would be better than Google. In reality, they weren’t (see image to right), and ChaCha still had to pay all those guides.

Today, according to an email sent to ChaCha’s guides titled “The Future Is Here,” they announced that guided search will be discontinued in favor of the one product they offer that isn’t monumentally dumb - mobile search. They claim that “new users are growing at a staggering rate every day” (most likely due to cell phone spamming).

So what happens to all the guides who worked on desktop search? Some of them, at least, can now apply for new positions on the mobile product.

The full email is below, and details of the company and their funding are here. Thanks Luke Kling for the tip.

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Valid password gets seat on board.

Microsoft has joined the MIT Kerberos Consortium, an organisation that develops the widely-used network authentication standard. It joins Apple, Google and Sun on the consortium's executive board.

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Valid password gets seat on board.

Microsoft has joined the MIT Kerberos Consortium, an organisation that develops the widely-used network authentication standard. It joins Apple, Google and Sun on the consortium's executive board.

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It's Verizon on the phone...

Verizon Business is extending many of the functions of a PBX phone system to BlackBerry users through a new product based on technology from Ascendent Systems, a subsidiary of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion.

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Displays 16,777,216 shades of marketing spin?

Apple has been hit by a class-action lawsuit claiming the company deceived customers over the quality of the screens in the 20-inch iMacs launched last summer.

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Microsoft forced to back down.

Microsoft plans to extend the availability of Windows XP for low-cost laptops beyond 30 June, with an announcement expected later this week, according to a source familiar with the situation.

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If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.

YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video. We’ll see if YouTube.com does the same at midnight EST tonight, too.

This is ok, but not nearly as funny as it would be if the YouTube team broke into the Google search servers and simply redirected Google.com to the video. Now that would be funny.

More coverage of this here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Google is rolling out a much-awaited feature for its hosted applications: the ability for people to use them even when they aren't connected to the Internet.

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iPass offers an inexpensive 3G card, unlimited US 3G service, and unlimited Wi-Fi service for a pretty remarkable monthly rate for the frequent traveler.

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When the iPhone went on sale in the U.S. last June, many observers predicted that it would ignite sales in the broader smartphone market. The iPhone has done just that, analysts at the Smartphone Summit in Las Vegas said today.

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