Happy Birthday Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers turns one today. The company will hold a celebration at its campus in Sunnyvale to celebrate how far they’ve come. In one year, Yahoo Answers has had 60 million users and 160 million answers.

Along with the party, Yahoo is publishing data from a Harris Interactive survey, showing how people are using online Q&A sites like Answers. The survey shows that one in three online adults have used a Q&A site, and of these, half say that information from a Q&A site has influenced a decision they have made.

According to the Harris survey, 55 percent of adults would prefer to have their questions answered from a group of individuals rather than an individual response from a friend or family member. And of course, users indicated that that they’d prefer the answers forum to be free with 81 percent saying that they would look to the Internet for answers if the service was free and 77 percent saying that they would look to the Internet if they knew they would receive instantaneous responses.

For this data, Harris surveyed 2,303 adults between November 27 and 29, which, ironically, is the same day that Google announced that they would close their answers program.