• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, February 10, 2012

The human-powered search and answers engine ChaCha issued a public apology yesterday for “inflammatory answers to questions asked about sensitive subjects.” The company did not refer directly to the incidents, but this all stems from an expose published by RightWingWatch.org earlier this week involving the Siri-like voice search app Iris on the Android operating system.

Iris uses ChaCha to provide some results involving answers to direct questions. In this case, the group caught the app giving strangely partisan responses to questions about whether “abortion is wrong.” The response took a decidedly pro-life stance, quoting the Bible and saying outright: “Yes, abortion is wrong.” Gizmodo followed up with additional questions regarding evolution, the truth of Scripture and provocative questions regarding whether rape is ever justified. In each case, the responses reflected a clear opinion. In other reports, ChaCha responses revealed blatantly Anti-Semitic responses.

ChaCha employs thousands of freelancers who supply many answers, both directly to users and also via a database look-up of stored responses. The company said in its statement that it is currently reviewing its database of two billion questions and answers. “We are correcting answers which do not comply with our policies,” they say. ChaCha is also tightening policies and training for its human guides.

In our spot check of the site and some of the queries involved, we found ChaCha had already altered some of the responses from the ones reported earlier. 

Apple suffered an earlier controversy with Siri’s difficulty finding abortion clinics, which the iPhone maker explained as a technical glitch. ChaCha was unequivocal in its admission of a problem and rapid in responding publicly to the revelation of weird search results.

ChaCha claims to reach 25 million monthly unique users across the Web, apps on iOS and Android, voice and via SMS searches.

Answers to sensitive questions surrounding abortion, birth control and sex are especially pertinent to ChaCha and its large audience of younger users. As we observed last year when the app added monitoring of nearby queries, many people seem to use the service to get critical answers. We observed frequent searches for information about birth control, pregnancy and sexual practices.

Clearly, many young people are using mobile search to get on-the-spot, critical information that could well change their lives.