Led by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, social search engine ChaCha announced that it had secured a $6 million funding round. ChaCha launched in Q3 last year and employs a network of live guides (college students, stay at home parents, retirees) to help answer user queries in real time in addition to providing traditional algorithmic search. Here’s my most recent write up on the engine from November.

Given its network of distributed guides, ChaCha is one of the more interesting recent search launches. While it started out quite slowly, the service and functionality have been getting much better.

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About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling