Last December, Yahoo! launched a service called "Yahoo! Answers Beta", a facility which allows users to ask questions on virtually any subject and have them answered free of charge. Since this time, they have become a fully fledged service, provided over 160 million answers and even found themselves a snappy mascot - a hamster, which appears to be dressed as a ninja.Yahoo! Answers works by allowing any user to post an answer to a question. The best answer is then picked by the Yahoo! Answers community, who vote for their favourite. This approach has been key to the success of the service: questions are answered free of charge, but some of these answers also lead to sprawling debates within its user community.
Yahoo! even has a page for their best answers, and a brief look at this page demonstrates the variety of questions and answers out there. There are practical dilemmas - for example, "What is the difference between a light brown hair dye and light ash brown?" - to more metaphysical problems, such as, "If we produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, why don't we?".
Furthermore, the Yahoo! Answers service gives many well-known celebrities and intellectuals the opportunity to gauge public opinion. A series of public figures, including Stephen Hawking, Hillary Clinton, Jonathon Ross and now Leonardo DiCaprio, have posted questions on Yahoo! Answers and, admirably, most of these questions have been about the future of humanity.
The success of Yahoo! Answers during the past year, however, has come at the expense of Google's own Answers service. Google Answers officially closed on the 1st of December 2006, although existing questions can be answered until the end of the year. The main difference between Google and Yahoo!'s facilities was that Google Answers was an "answer brokering" service. People paid between $2 and $200 for a Google certified expert to do the research, and got their answers hassle-free.
Many industry commentators have attributed the failure of Google Answers to the fact that users were unwilling to pay for a service they could get elsewhere for free. However, the provision of free responses appears to be only one factor in the success of Yahoo! Answers. Essentially, Yahoo! Answers appears to represent greater human contact in the online world, with a burgeoning community of researchers and active forum users. Ongoing discussions between users are freely visible, and the service shows that it values the opinions of its users by allowing them to vote for the best answer to a question.
This sharing of information and the high valuation of an individual's expertise in any given subject has provided an excellent service to web users, and it looks as though Yahoo! Answers will continue to flourish as social networking and social search on the World Wide Web expands.
Yahoo! should give itself a large pat on the back on Yahoo! Answers' first birthday!
