One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Answerbag, Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, and Hunch. Now Ask, arguably the original Q&A search engine (in that it encouraged searches to be asked as a question, not that the answers came from other humans), is waving its arms to remind people that you can ask questions and find answers there as well.
In fact, it is doing a little more than that. Today, it launched a Q&A tab on its site which taps into a new database of 300 million pairs of questions and answers, which it has crawled and indexed from around the Web. In other words, it is crawling the other Q&A sites to look for the best answers to a particular question. It is also applying some semantic and clustering filters to group similar questions together and to try to surface the most relevant results. It is more of a search engine for Q&A sites than a Q&A site itself. You can’t answer any of the questions, just search for what other people have answered on other sites.
At first glance, I find it a bit unsatisfying. I asked it, What is the best Q&A site? Yahoo Answers seemed to be the consensus, but no other choices even surfaced. I tried, What is the newest Q&A site? and it turns up only a single result from someone on Yahoo Answers asking how to go about creating a new Q&A site.
Does Ask even search Mahalo Answers? If it did, it would have found this question (”What other question and answer services have you used, tried or have found interesting besides Mahalo Answers?”) that includes a long list of more than 25 Q&A sites, many of which I had never even heard of (including Afraid To Ask, Ask An Owner, Blurtit, and Quenchmark).
It is not just that the answers on the handful of queries I tried weren’t so great, it is that taking a purely algorithmic approach to Q&A is the wrong answer. Obviously there are way too many Q&A sits out there and Ask is trying to find the best existing answers from everything that is out there across different Q&A sites. But offering Q&A search without letting people ask new questions or improve the results by offering their own answers kind of misses the whole point of Q&A. It is people helping out people to find the best answers to their questions. At least the Q&A startups are trying to move the ball forward by building a community and incentives around Q&A (Mahalo Answers), machine-learning and game-play (Hunch), or let you tap into your direct social circle for more trustworthy answers (Aardvark).
These sites get smarter the more people who use them and some of them offer personalized answers as well. The right answer to any question often depends on who is asking. Ask thinks there is one or two right answers for everyone.
(Image above courtesy PhotoXpress).
the “success” of yahoo answers? Have you guys ever actually read any of yahoo’s “answers”?
ive used yahoo answers and thought it was good. i dont know what youre talking about, there are occasional troll answers but there usually funny
I ‘ve found good answers more times than i have found bad answers. That is success for me.
I actually really like Mahalo answers from Twitter. I’m often in situations where I’m betting money on stupid things (like, is Oscar the Grouch a monster or not?) and they help me win/lose quickly.
Why does anyone use Ask?
Or why does anyone use anything other than Google?
because bing has a better interface moron
You like the jeep too?
“Why does anyone use Ask?”
Because the other, better IAC properties lead people to the site (some of them anyway). If not for them, ASK would be a walking carcass.
ASK’s skins aren’t bad though.
Mahalo Answers is going to end up toppling all of these anyway. Far superior quality of questions and answers, and more interesting personalities roaming the site, like its leader.
Fluther’s Q&A quality isn’t bad either, but going crazy because Mahalo Answers was scraping it was obnoxious. Also, do you think when they were deciding the name for Fluther they said, “Let’s see if we can pick the name that most closely resembles someone’s role in a porn shoot.”
Hi,
And to think that AQA-63336 (any Question Answered) has been going for about 7 years, mobile-ready from day-1.
Kind regards,
Shakir Razak
I just performed several search queries on Ask in the Q&A tab and all I saw in the results was Yahoo and chacha. And Ask calls displaying repetitive questions from Yahoo with their mediocre answers a new Service?
Excellent point on using algo search and not letting their users just ask a question – I’ve found that Google already does an excellent job of indexing, crawling, and returning relevant Q&A from various Q&A sites, so it seems like Ask is differentiating up the wrong tree on this one.
not only that, but just yesterday i saw a question come up in google that had been posted to ask.metafilter less than 5min before I searched.
ask is a bunch of charlatans anyway. like someone asked above, why does anybody use them, especially if they’re just repackaging questions ripped from other sites? this is no different than any other SEO linkscam out there.
No one has given credit to cha cha and KGB. A human powered search. Is it because the CEO left?
Guais, The CEO of ChaCha is definetly not gone http://tiny.cc/UYVtQ
I am surprised you left out answerbag.com? Over 4.2mm uniques according to Comscore this month!
Sorry I jumped the gun on my comment. I didn’t see the reference to answerbag.com in the first sentence and noticed our logo was not highlighted. I do LOVE the fact that answerbag is the #1 organic search result for the question you posed on Ask about the best Q&A site.
If you have questions regarding pictures http://www.picanswers.com/ works well.
it’s a shame ChaCha wasn’t included in this story since the company has one of the most comprehensive (and funny) Q&A site with 14 million searchable questions and answers. And according to Quantcast,
http://www.chacha.com ranks among the top
web sites in the United States with more than 2.3 million monthly unique users. http://tiny.cc/mX0Cc
And, let the astroturfing begin, lol.
Really…including Mahalo is a joke, in this list. Or “vark”…why?
The top five q&a sites, per quantcast, in the US:
Yahoo Answers
Wiki Answers
Answerbag
Blurtit (you guys never mention them, ever, why?)
FunAdvice (we only got a mention because I bcc’d Mike on a very outrageous email…which was a reply to an equally outrageous note I received).
Picanswers? Please….I still don’t understand WTF mashable was doing when they gave you the free press you (arguably) shouldn’t have gotten. Oh, yah. btw, FunAdvice was the *first* Q&A service to incroporate questions with photos that you can add from your photo library or from an upload…*smack* lol.
Chacha? Please, also…guys, if you have a pile of money that’s on FIRE…you’re not going to last long.
Don’t worry about us, though…we’re on track for 5 million+ visitors (4.7 million uniques this month)…and, we’re just fine. Though these other guys…well, I’d be very anxious if I’d poured my money down those drains.
Yo dude,
There is no reason to be a tardcarnival. I am glad to hear you were the first Q&A service to incorporate questions with photos…. shame you are not the best at it. Picanswers has you there. *smack*
I wonder if your 5 million uniques will enjoy this match?
Q: my nipples hurt really bad! what does that mean?
A: well your probably growing some more. thats what happens with me when they hurt! pain releaver doesnt help, so dont waste it.
ASK waves its arms to tell everyone it also does Q & A search. Bad Q & A search.
Been there, done that.
Built using Google’s Search services – http://QAFind.com
I never use ASK .i only use Google and Yahoo .
yahoo and google is the best than ASK i have ever used .
You can find all questions and answers about a *topic” (keyword(s) from all sources – this is the main point of Ask’s aggregation of 300 million answers, put your favorite medication name, or celebrity name. It is web FAQ. Just learn how to use it! It works great for me.
Try “viagra”
Hello,
I just came out out with an iPhone app (it’s FREE) that directly connects you to ChaCha. It’s called iChaCha Now (not associated with the service) just a direct connect app.
Check it out! It rose to the TOP 200 in Entertainment in the first week. It’s basically a simple and fun way to connect to the service.