Yahoo’s Big Win

November 30th, 2006 at 8:47 am

Ask & answer model are getting popular today, when I read this article, I would like to review another one here, that is “Google no answers”, Michael, I have to say…techcrunch is something, how about techcrunch to host an discusstion board to discuss the same business model but run by different companies? In fact, I do think someone would like that.

Maybe from the discusstion, we can find something inside out, what do you think?

November 30th, 2006 at 8:53 am

Well that answers my question about questions. Next question for Yahoo. When are you going to acquire craigslist.com so you can become the leader in classifieds ads, because partnering with newspapers might seem good, but Craigslist is doing 5 billion page views per month, thus making the newspaper irrelevant, (I said in my post last week, I only use the newspaper to light my BBQ), if you acquired craigslist.com I’m sure you could monetize those 5 billion page views, which would help with your revenues and over all stock price.

November 30th, 2006 at 9:22 am

Are there more difficult questions asked on Yahoo Answers than the birds and poop one? Is it like a glorified Mechanical Turk frontend to Wikipedia?

I’m not sure what the target audience is for these types of applications. Are people asking complex questions? Are there experts answering them? How is this different than asking the drunks at the local bar for their opinion on a subject?

November 30th, 2006 at 9:44 am

This is a really really good analysis Michael. Glad to see you back in the saddle.

November 30th, 2006 at 10:01 am

Hi Michael,
I have been a fan of TechCrunch since shortly after you began. I have loved following your success and watching you build a kingdom. Great Job! I have been visiting your website on a regular basis and reading your feed in NetNewsWire. Today, I removed your feed after reading the Yahoo Answers post. I have reached the point that it drives me crazy going in link circles within your posts. It would be nice if you would actually include a link TO the site or information you are discussing. There may be a link to Yahoo Answers in the post, but it wasn’t easy for me to find. When you make it difficult for me to find information and trap me in a link box of your own posts, I am no longer interested in playing or contributing to your own self aggrandizement. How many other readers have you alienated lately? Best regards and much success to you in the future. I am sure one reader no longer matters much. I miss the old TechCrunch.
Sincerely,
Rick Cummings

November 30th, 2006 at 10:15 am

The only reason you need an Answers website is because the search itself sucks and you need to resort to others to help. Yahoo should learn from Google and focus more energy on improving search results and helping people get answers through that vs. relying on Answers.

November 30th, 2006 at 10:19 am

er… to Rick Cummings, #10

November 30th, 2006 at 10:39 am

I love Yahoo! (I bought their stocks at $23 and now they’re at $27 ). I hope they kick Google’s butt in every market.

@ Rick, quit being a little wuss.

November 30th, 2006 at 11:00 am

I disagree with what finder said The q&a model could give you direct answers rather than you 1. coming up with a good query to describe your search 2. dig from hundreds search results and find which one really answers your question. To most of the people step 1 is really difficult and 2 is very cumbersome.

It looks to me that either search or q&a has a lot of room to improve, and either one can win over the other. Yahoo answers gained traffic, but lacks in the quality of answers. Google answer’s approach aims at quality answers, but the problematic part is its charged model. There’re several startups (I’m not from either of these that are aiming at fixing the quality of answers, e.g. http://www.qunu.com, http://yedda.com, etc. I particularly like qunu and would love to see how these startup compete with yahoo.

The ideal scenario I can imagine for q&a is 1. user asks a question 2. user gets an answer and he’s fairly convinced the answer is correct. Yahoo answers currently provides you with dozens of answers. In a dozen, a typical case is that 3 are right, 4 are useless, and 5 are either wrong or half-wrong. That’s why many of yahoo’s question are survey typed, or non-serious questions. It’d be nice, if one answer is provided, and you’re sure this is fairly correct. Google targeted at it but failed. However, I still think q&a one day can be at that stage.

November 30th, 2006 at 11:12 am

I believe Google’s the winner. They realized the service sucked before Yahoo did.

November 30th, 2006 at 11:34 am

Yahoo Answers is cool…but not a new concept. http://www.experts-exchange.com/ have been following this model for a long time.

November 30th, 2006 at 11:46 am

The google fanboy syndrome runs so deep that even an article about how Yahoo gets a win over the big G eventually mentions how this is good for google! Amazing. While the logic holds some water, maybe, kinda, and I love the big G too, I just thought that was funny.

November 30th, 2006 at 12:21 pm

the only thing that puzzles me about stuff like this is how on earth did Google manage to be so inept? i mean, 800 users over 4 years? at what point did the MBAs in charge of Google Answers say, ‘uh guys - i think our product sucks and we should probably change something’?

Apparently, that just happened - they chopped the product completely. It’s so difficult to understand that. In such a sea of extreme competence - how could such a large sea of incompetence be allowed to wallow?

if anything, hearing this from Google makes me think they needed to be able to fire some people, and the best way to do that was to axe this product completely.

November 30th, 2006 at 1:10 pm

When you get in the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.

November 30th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

I cannot agree more with Rajesh and many of the other who prefers quality answers. I too think quality is the key and yahoo now has too much garbage in its database. In real lives, when we ask a question, we want one answer and one correct answer. nonsense answers, repetitive content, false information … are all bad.

I don’t think google’s approach’s bad. what sucks is its revenue model. Almost all other q&a sites are offered free, and google’s was charged. Besides, even if your answers are superior, you need to let others acknowledge that first. That probably means you need to offer it free for a short period until ppl realize your product is really better than yahoo’s and willing to pay the money. You need to let customers be willing to take the first step.

just my 2cents.

November 30th, 2006 at 3:04 pm

I’m actually a bit surprised at Google’s action. Google Answers created a decent asset with very little promotion and would appear to be able to run nearly on auto-pilot.

The two services are so different, it’s hard to say Yahoo “won” anything here.

Even though Yahoo Answers is 99% crap, the 1% will trickle in to search results except I’m not sure if this will advantage Yahoo since Google has the same access to the content.

November 30th, 2006 at 4:00 pm

I like this one. Yahoo on top of “Answers” Game. You see, you got to appreciate the effort, whoever (aol, yahoo, msn) puts in to stay in the web game. Afterall, its us who get the benefit. I congratulate Yahoo team to pull this off. Good luck to google. May be something bigger is in store. Can’t underestimate them.

November 30th, 2006 at 5:24 pm

All this talk about the assumption that Google only “attracted” 800 people to answer questions is silly. Google limited the number of people answering questions because they ensured the answerers were qualified researchers. It was a closed group, and they hadn’t been accepting new applications for a while. Google Answers may have failed, but it was smaller than Yahoo BY DESIGN.

November 30th, 2006 at 6:09 pm

Are you freaking serious!? Yahoo’s service is for kids asking if they should talk to the guy they have a crush on. You could actually enlist deep research on Google Answers and get access to very obscure answers. Where are THOSE researchers going now? Not en masse to Yahoo I’m sure, as many used it to make their living. The difference in sites is vast, and its a real loss that Google has closed their deep-value site down.

November 30th, 2006 at 9:40 pm

Hi Michael,

It’s really impress me about your reply to Rick.

December 1st, 2006 at 1:33 am

When will Yahoo have the balls to kill all their duplicate services?

December 1st, 2006 at 10:48 am

sorry to hear google answers closing down. I personally liked it very much. enough for the bad news. now the good news:

http://www.wuyaSea.com welcomes all google answer refugees.

WuyaSea.com allow you to ask question for free or for a fee (minimum $2). any category, any topic.
WuyaSea.com also allow you to answer any questions, our commission now is 20% + $0.20.

http://www.wuyaSea.com
wuyaSea Operator

March 9th, 2007 at 7:20 pm

I’m actually a bit surprised at Google’s action. Google Answers created a decent asset with very little promotion and would appear to be able to run nearly on auto-pilot.

The two services are so different, it’s hard to say Yahoo “won” anything here.

Even though Yahoo Answers is 99% crap, the 1% will trickle in to search results except I’m not sure if this will advantage Yahoo since Google has the same access to the content.