I first met Yedda founders Avichay Nissenbaum and Yaniv Golan during a trip to Israel in February 2006. The company, which hosts a question and answer service that is similar in some ways to Yahoo Answers, launched later that year.

Tonight they’re announcing their acquisition by AOL. Terms are not being disclosed. The current plan, says Yedda, is to keep the company as an independent business operating from its current location in Tel Aviv with the current team. They will gradually integrate it into the AOL properties.

Yedda has evolved significantly since last year. They still compete directly with Yahoo and others, but they also partner with others to power independent Q&A services as well. There are more than fifty partners working with Yedda now – example partners are ePals and TheJobNetwork. Yedda says those partners now drive 90% of their total traffic.

The company, which has raised $2.5 million in venture capital, is still small but growing rapidly. Comscore shows a big jump in usage since the summer, from 215,000 unique users in June to nearly 800,000 last month (see above, this does not count partner traffic).

The last time we took a look at Israeli startup Yedda was in January 2006. Today they’ve left private beta and are allowing anyone to use the service.

Yedda is a question and answer service, comparable to Yahoo Answers, Wondir, Google Answers and Oyogi. With the exception of Google Answers, all of these services, including Yedda, are free, and go to great effort to leverage the community to ensure quality answers.

Yahoo Answers seems to have gotten the model mostly right, and they announced the 10 millionth answer back in May (a recent email from Yahoo says they are up to 30 million answers, and Comscore says they had 14.3 million unique visitors in July). Oyogi and Wondir seem to be in a traffic funk, while Google will have a very hard time competing based on their pricing model. Note that wondir may also be changing their business model – see the notice linked from this page.

Yedda is doing a number of things differently than the other guys, and one feature in particular stands out. If you would like to answer questions, you can register, via tags, on topics that you feel you are qualified to discuss. Yedda will then reach out to you via email (or RSS or IM) when questions come in that you might want to answer. I’ve registered myself under a few different topics, and it seems to me that I’m more likely to read an email asking for my help than remember to go to the site and browse for questions. That may give this small startup the edge it needs to carve out a successful niche for itself.

Another feature I like is that they allow users to post questions of any length, and include pictures. The other services don’t allow this. Yedda also has a flat hierarchy (v. Yahoo Answers, which forces a category assignment), and tag suggestions based on a semantic analysis of the question. Finally, they will keep a question “fresh” until answered. What all this means: Yedda is making a real effort to help people get questions answered, and then using those completed questions in the future to help others.

If there is room for an independent service in this space, Yedda may be in a good position to win.

Give it a try. There is already some good beta user content on the site. A good place to start is to review the questions about Yedda itself, here.

Last Sunday I attended an ad hoc tech lunch in Tel Aviv, Israel to meet six great web 2.0 startups there. Attending were founders from I4giveu, Maxthon, Raw Sugar, Spotback, Triplay and Yedda. Daniel Cohen from Gemini Israel Funds, Ouriel Ohayon (TechCrunch France author) and other tech enthusiasts were there as well.

We had a great meal and a great discussion. My pictures from the event are up on flickr here.

The six startups that were represented include:

I4giveu

Founder Alon Carmel is a gifted designer and developer and is getting ready to launch his stealth project I4giveu. Very few details on the service were revealed, but as always I love the email collecting landing page with promises of amazement in a very short time. Sign up here. One thing Alon did say was this: “Each user will earn his reputation from angel to devil according to his post ranked by other community users.” Sounds like fun!

Maxthon Browser

Netanel Jacobsson represented Maxthon Browser, the controversial but popular IE based browser that has surpassed 50 million downloads. Ouriel Ohayon writes about Maxthon here.

Raw Sugar

The executive team of Raw Sugar is based in Silicon Valley, the development effort is led by Frank Smadja out of Haifa, Israel. I’ve written about Raw Sugar on TechCrunch previously, and they are moving toward launch of a new feature which will automatically import tag and category information from blogs to create a single browsable and searchable directory. Great stuff.

Spotback

Spotback founders Micha Kaufman and Amit Kaufman gave me an early look at credential-protected Spotback, which is going to be a winner. Look for a full profile soon, but Spotback is a personalized news and rating/sharing site that has very strong features and will give front runners like Newsvine a real run for their money. Design and functionality is top notch. Sign up for the beta here. I would not be surprised if Spotback received joint Israel-US VC funding in the very near future.

Triplay

Yaron Orenstein spoke to me briefly about Triplay, a very young company that is looking to create a cross-platform mul­ti­me­dia platform (computer-mobile-television). There are very few details on the site, but Triplay looks interesting. “Think People NOT technology…TriPlay’s Super Messaging service will enable people to easily communicate all types of media and content across their PC, TV, and Mobile devices.” Look for a full review on MobileCrunch soon.

Yedda

I’ve been talking to Yaniv Golan and Avichay Nissenbaum, the founders of Yedda, since last December. See my teaser post on them from January. Yedda should be taking the wrapper off their service within the next few weeks, and I’ll be dong a full profile.

All of these entrepreneurs are humble and flat out brilliant. I’m excited to see good stuff coming out of Israel, and look forward to watching these six new companies grow.

There are only a few details emerging about Israel-based Yedda, which will be launching in the next month or so (the current home page is taking email registrations).

My understanding is that the service will be somewhat similar to Yahoo Answers, Wondir, Google Answers and Oyogi, with some key differences that the founders hope will result in significantly more user participation, and better answers.