Yahoo Has All the Answers -- Well, More Answers, Anyway

Apparently 42 isn't enough. Yahoo announced 15 May that Yahoo Answers has reached more than ten million answers in the US since its beta launch last December. Yahoo has also officially launched Yahoo! Canada Answers, now available at http://answers.yahoo.ca.

So far Yahoo Answers is available in Australia, Canada, India, the UK, and the US. Spain, Germany, and France are denoted as "coming soon." Folks in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have Yahoo Knowledge Search, which is described as "a Yahoo! Answers-type product."

I must confess to being a bit mystified by the search engines' attraction to "Answers" type services. Sure, it's cheap content, interactive, and you can potentially stick advertising throughout. But the quality of what's produced is all over the map. Google's Q&A service offers one barrier to response -- money -- that seems to help the quality of the content generated. Maybe Yahoo's points system would also let the best stuff rise to the top. I dunno. I would rather have a search offering that searches only the archives of selected "Ask a Librarian" services... hmm... come to think of it, that wouldn't be too difficult to do....

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo