Yahoo Answers launched this morning. The service allows any Yahoo user to ask any question and get answers and advice from other Yahoo users. The community picks the “best” answer, and everything is archived for search.
There is a product tour available here. A similr service, Wondir, launched earlier this year.
Yahoo Answers is taking a different (and more web 2.0) approach than Google Answers, which charges for answers and relies on paid experts. To incentivize users, Yahoo is creating a points system based on quality and quantity of participation.
There are a number of interesting features built in, including spam flags and RSS feeds for every question. I only have one complaint.
Tagging. Yahoo owns one of the best tagging sites out there - Flickr. And yet they continue to stumble on the tagging issue when launching new products. Shoposphere, for instance, desperately needs tagging (it will be added early next year). In this case, Yahoo Answers requries you to categorize your question under a single pre-defined category, and then choose further pre-defined sub categories.
While this certainly helps structure the data for easier search, it isn’t very useful to the publisher. It would be so much easier if, like Flickr, the person asking the question could tag it with a few descriptive terms. They have an incentive to get it right, and Yahoo would quickly have rich enough data to create a virtual category on the fly as users search or browse through the listings.
Making this a free, community-driven service takes it way beyond Google answers. Take the next step: ditch this impossible to maintain category system and move to tagging and dynamic, on-the-fly taxonomy.
BTW, Ask Metafilter has been doing this for a year or two now, and has tagging and is free.
Interesting, we thought of developing something similar, but after careful discussion we realized relying on the benevolence of users probably would not work. On Google Answers, there is a clear monetary incentive to answer a question, and answer it well. We considered a points system, but the “pay it forward” approach I feel will not work.
I guess we’ll see!
Ah, after looking some more, seems they will be offering some monetary incentive to top answerers.
I’m betting the “repost” becomes a problem though, in fact I’ve already seen a few people saying they’d already answered that elsewhere.
Still, looking forward to seeing how it does. Of course since they already have a user-base, it will be hard to tell exactly how much new traffic it generates for Yahoo.
Peter: Actually, Ask Metafilter charges a one-time $5 fee to join the community, no? Not that I’m complaining — it’s well worth it, in my eyes.
it is a very cumbersome process..you go on and o filling fields and fields of data.feels like i am doing Fox Pro or something ..and finally i just gave it up…very uncool!!
web 2.0ish stuff aside is it just me or on a practical level of usefulness does it seem like many of the questions would be better suited to a quick google search than waiting for someone to give you a good answer. I find Meta filter much more useful.
I’ve been using this service for about a week now and I have to say I am pretty disappointed by the immaturity level with the users there. I have achieved level 2 almost exclusively by answering what I feel are legitimate questions in the Computer category, but I find that I am spending more time reporting abusers than answering questions.
Every time I log into their website I find at least one repeat question; one of the most common–”What is Web 2.0″? There are also the blatent farming of points such as “What is 2 pluss 2?” (yes, that’s an exact quote, including the mispelling of plus). I see this service doomed for failure by the people who view it as more of a game (I can get a higher level than you can!) than a resource.
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