Nine students here have joined a legion of others at universities across the country doing something that never used to be profitable: Searching the Internet.

With the launch yesterday of ChaCha.com, a website relying on human guides instead of algorithms to track down Web pages for users, students such as junior business major Ali Mansour are landing jobs that can be done from the comfort of a dorm room.

“It’s really great,” Mansour, said. “I thought it would be really cool to work from home, and I spend so much time on the Internet anyway.”

ChaCha spokeswoman Danielle Stealy said the company actively recruits students as employees because they’re within a sought-after age demographic, and they tend to have more flexible hours.

“You can do it on your own time wherever you have a high speed connection,” Stealy said. “It’s almost like a customer service website … you’re only given one or two or three results instead of 10 million from Google.”

Students are paid anywhere between $5 and $20 an hour, Stealy said, and none of them are required to work regular hours – or any hours for that matter. The company employs about 3,000 guides across the country.

“Whenever I have my laptop with me I can make some money,” said Tony Pu, a senior economics and criminal justice major. He said he plans on working 10 to 15 hours per week, mostly during his other job since he can bring his computer.

Although the site launches this week, it has run into a few early problems. Early yesterday afternoon, the site stopped accepting search queries, posting a message that read: “ChaCha is currently making significant performance improvements to its system.” The site was back up and running by the evening.

Before that, it took several different queries before a guide could be successfully contacted.

When asked “Is Pluto still a planet?” a chat bar appeared on the left side of the screen, and a guide finally responded to the question by sending three links; the first was an article in the International Herald Tribune which reported that scientists in Myanmar, a small Southeast Asian country ruled by a military junta, had rejected Pluto’s demotion.

The second was a page on NASA’s website last updated in the late 1990s addressing the controversy. The third link provided by the guide was a site that sells T-shirts reading “Save Pluto.”

“It’s full of glitches right now,” admitted Mansour, though he said he’s optimistic about the site’s future.

Mansour is classified as an apprentice level guide, the lowest of four in the ChaCha hierarchy. As an apprentice, Mansour undergoes training and is not paid. But he can move into the “pro, master and elite” levels fairly quickly, he said.

At the level of “pro” guides begin conducting searches and earn money for the hours they put in. Based on how long each query takes to satisfy, guides are promoted to the level of “master” and then “elite,” where they can earn as much as $20 an hour.

By tomorrow, Mansour expects to be a master, but money isn’t his only motivation, he said.

“I think it’s an awesome idea,” he said, “because it’s based on people.”

Contact reporter Andrew Vanacore at vanacoredbk@gmail.com.