ChaCha search engine with live guides

ChaCha, which describes itself as "the world's largest live search engine," is now available in beta form. The interesting feature is the defining one - ChaCha can supply "a human guide who assists you in real-time via an instant-message chat."

"Even expert searchers don't always have the answers," reasoned CEO Scott A. Jones. "ChaCha's search-with-a-guide process connects you to a live person who has knowledge about your particular topic and who knows the best resources on the web for that topic."

Search Engine Watch's Greg Sterling has reviewed the site in both its alpha and beta forms, and writes that "there have been some significant improvements." He provided a transcript of his experience with one guide, though, and it's not overly encouraging - Sterling's inquiry about non-toxic household cleaning products led to what he called a "philosophical argument."

Full story

Off content links vs. in-text links

In the light of the recent acquisition of Text-Link-Ads, Inc., which de-facto is a simple text link broker many web professionals asked themselves: are the simple off content text-links still working on the web? The purchase of the TLA (Text-Link-Ads, Inc.) answers positively to that question and it seems obvious that static text links continue to bring results on the web if you buy strategic ones (with high PageRank, well trafficked, for SEO purposes, etc.) although they are not contextual and generally placed off the page content.

As many experts agree that buying simple text links put off the content seems to be working well for many web sites on the web in the past years, they also outline the new trends on the web today and that there are already sort of more pragmatic contextual approaches on the rise presently, one of which seems to be http://linkedwords.com/, which goes far beyond simple text links and helps web sites link to each other for free on a content-area per content-area basis by using a precise contextual, grammatical and meaningful method that organizes the links within the content’s context, etc, etc…

Are concepts like LinkedWords.com a treat for simple off-topic text links that Text-Link-Ads, Inc., and other companies of that sector sell? Perhaps not, but definitely the future belongs to links positioned within the text of your content page which are contextually relevant links to your surrounding sentences rather than a simple non-contextual and off-content link.
Simple off-context text links approach seems a thing of the past.