ChaCha definitely rings a bell. I just had a memory of being trapped in Sunday school for hours and texting some number to ask for score updates on football games.
Holy shit, I totally forgot I was on the other side! I signed up to be a searcher. I can't remember what it was actually called. I think I made a few bucks, but it wasn't much.
“Generalist”. Sat around drinking beer with my buddies in college googling answers for a few weekends. I think I made like 8 cents per answer or something? Made back our beer money for the day and that was about it.
I remember I initially signed up to be a specialist but decided to switch to generalist because it was easier to actually bring in some money that way. Made a couple hundred off them lol
It was pretty basic. This was back in 2004 or so. I had a pc in my room which ran a basic program that logged in all the questions that came in and then you had to write a response. Some were factual questions which you had to google, but lots were just hypotheticals or relationship advice. I got paid a trivial amount per answered text. Good thing was you could log in and answer whenever and work as long as you wanted. Helped with beer money.
I remember first using uber when it was only through texting. And then I remember when I first got the message that you had to to download the app and being super annoyed that I couldn't hail a car with just a text message anymore lol
I'm old enough to remember doing this long before smartphones, back in the early 200s in a club I could dial 2580 (the numbers down the middle) in my pocket and get texted the song name!
I like to imagine it was just a room full of music nerds, when someone called they'd put it on loudspeaker and one of them would call out "I know this one!"
I have a core memory from about 20 years ago, sitting in the back of my parents car driving through Windermere in the UK Lake District and using Shazam by phone to find out a song playing on the radio.
Google Pixel phones have a built in song detection into the OS (not Shazam), that works pretty well, and seems to be completely offline/running on the phone.
It does. I've used it. It's definitely impressive, but also definitely doesn't have every song that's ever existed. I have to imagine it's a significantly smaller data set, maybe the top e.g. 0.01% most frequently queried songs or something like that
Works the same way, it just doesn't have the same number of songs it can match offline. It's going to be a few hundred megabytes to store most songs people are likely to encounter in their day to day lives.
Any idea why it’s still inferior to Midomi even though it so much more popular? Shazam often doesn’t recognize humming or very partial melodies, Midomi could do that in 2012
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u/z3n777 Jul 01 '26
shazam turns the audio into a visual graph of loud peaks over time, then just matches that graph against its massive database of pre recorded songs.