The service, very similar to Yahoo! Answers, is free and allows users to accrue points for good quality answers. One main difference, however, is that users will soon be able to redeem the points on Amazon's Questville.com rather than use them to climb up "levels" of users on the service. The scope for the Askville and Questville rewards scheme is large and users may be attracted to the vast array of products that Amazon could potentially offer. One question currently on the website is "What would you (realistically) like to be able to use your QuestCoins for?", showing that the scheme is already stimulating the interest of some users.Another trump card for Amazon's service is their relationship with Mechanical Turk, a research service owned by the company. Users of this service work together to carry out demanding work such as transcription, translating text or identifying specific objects in images. Users are paid for the work that they do; in this way, the site bears a large resemblance to Google's defunct Answers service. The affiliation with Mechanical Turk will, according to Amazon, guarantee at least one answer to every question that is asked on Askville. This will guard against unanswered questions that sometimes get swept away on Yahoo! Answers due to the sheer number of questions asked and will also stop users from being frustrated when they ask a more in depth question which doesn't get answered.
2007 is widely touted to be a major year in the development of human-assisted Internet search with Answers.com, Answerbag.com, Keen.com and Microsoft all vying to compete with Yahoo! and Amazon. Yahoo! undoubtedly has the upper hand in the battle for users so far, but don't expect them to end up as winners without a fight.
