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The secret to Yahoo! Answers' success

money.cnn.com — "Yahoo Answers has become the second most popular Internet reference site after Wikipedia, according to Comscore. In June, Yahoo Answers attracted 12.3 million unique visitors, a 35 percent spike from the previous month. (For comparison, media sensation YouTube had 13.4 million visitors in June.)"

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parislemon 2 years 43 days ago, made popular 2 years 43 days ago

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Progranism, on 10/12/2007, -18/+6Never used it, nor heard of it. Sure sounds popular ...
- IQ70, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Stephen Hawkings has heard of it. He even asked a question over there!
  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20060704195516AAnrdOD
- Seumas, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Yeah, and look at the retarded answers he got from people. He asked a serious question and the responses were all like "we must love jesus and one another".
  
  Bah. Those children shouldn't have an internet connection.
- ggko, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4har har! Dr. Hawking is a mere level 1 user. Loser!
  
  ;)
- Ciantic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1"Bah. Those children shouldn't have an internet connection."
  
  You mean US and Turkey?
- v4m21, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@ggko
  
  Despite he is being paralized I think "He is much better than u."
- rileyjt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I used it once - got some stupid answers and never looked at it again :) Sounds like things have improved a bit though, I'll definitely have to check it out.
kidtone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Looking at the Yahoo Answers point system, it appears to me that there is an incentive to answer as many questions as possible as quickly as possible without worrying about accuracy. I think that's going to need some tuning.
- mayna, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0A lot of people do that, but you can "level up" faster by giving good answers that people think are the best. I was playing around with it for awhile, but then realized I was wasting a lot of time. I'm level 3, now what? yee haw.
wsq314, on 10/12/2007, -13/+1khjkhjkhjk
razei, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Yahoo! Answers seemed like a cool idea when it first came out, but all those ugly avatars staring me in the face kind of turned me off. I'll stick with Wikipedia for now. :P
amarcus, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6still prefer Google Answers. You may have to pay but the answers are accurate and concise.
ashley91, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Could it's success not be to do with the Yahoo! Answers Bus?
http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/brainbus/

I visited it. They had a guy with a microphone outside, saying to a kid "Ask me any question you like, and we will find the answer with the magic of Yahoo! Answers!". I was so tempted to say "Why do you need to use the microphone to talk to a kid that's around 3 feet away from you?
- blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2This page was not found.
  
  Edit: And now it is found.
Seumas, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7What success? Every time I have seen something on Yahoo! Answers, it's a bunch of idiotic drivel. The questions are retarded "Do you love jesus?" and the replies are beyond idiotic. Usually from people who make the twelve year old valley girls at Total Request Live tapings look down right intelligent.

I wouldn't ask Yahoo! Answers for the number to 911 even if my balls were being eaten by vicious cockroaches. It is quite possibly the stupidest service on the internet and carried out in the least coherent, most juvenile way.

The secret to their "success" is that they marketed it to peopel who are too inarticulate and too stupid to provide content and answers at Wikipedia.
kidhero, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Oh. Yahoo Anwsers, where one person poses a subject and others make answers? Sort of like a forum/BBS? Actually not sort of, maybe it is a forum? This is popular because Yahoo spams it on its network of sites?

Wow. Who would have thunk it?
salmacis, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Yahoo Answers, is, as has been pointed out, utter crap. I recommend Ask Metafilter (ask.metafilter.com) if you want serious, thoughtful answers to your questions. Registration costs $5, but that seems to keep the trolls away.
- zzztimbo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I agree with salmacis. Metafilter is a much better resource, without all the "yahoos."
  http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/44394
- yanivg2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0MetaFilter is a great resource indeed. You might also want to check out Yedda (http://yedda.com).
  
  Unlike other services, there is no point system in Yedda, and you don't need to answer in order to ask. Plus, no limits on question or answer length, and you can include rich text, images, video, formatting, anything you need in order to make your question or answer clearer.
  
  Below the surface though Yedda is different in a number of aspects that make it more suitable to provide high signal-to-noise ratio even as more people use it. For example, Yedda keeps questions "fresh" for as long as the asker needs - questions continue to be highlighted to relevant people even if newer questions are posted, preventing the "bulletin board effect".
  
  Also, questions are classified using a free form tagging approach, though Yedda goes the extra mile and suggests appropriate tags (or topics) based on analysis of the question text.
  
  Check it out.
Sudha, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4ok google worshipers... tell me something... would it hurt if u ask a valid question and get a worthy answers for free? i think Y! Answers has the '+' point and will one way or another will become famous soon.
asdfasdf, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Yahoo! Answers sucks for one simple reason. You have to answer a question to gain points to level up. Most people just answer any question with any answer simply to gain points, without doing any research or thinking.
bluephoenix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think Yahoo answers is a cool concept, but I still use google for any questions I ever have. It's quicker and provides more sources. Between google's search and wikipedia anyone can usually get an answer relatively fast.
- valona, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Why did she sleep with my best friend? Can Wikipedia answer that? Can google provide me with enlightenment as to the best place to buy a pair of trousers when I'm thrown out of a house at 3am in the morning? No it can't. Can Wikipedia provide me with the answer to the question 'Why is Wikipedia a ***** place to look for 'factual' information and not the biased opinions of the relatively small group of encylofascists who patrol the place? Can Google answer the question 'why is google increasingly inaccurate?'. First result back is a link to Digg, a site filled with Apple hyperbole and 14 million '100 Ubuntu tips' articles. It proves the point. A site like Yahoo Answers, experts-exchange etc will always have its place.
- bluephoenix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Questions like that probably shouldn't be even asked online, in that case I recommend having friends in real life to ask.
sheesh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Yahoo Answers is a message board for people too ignorant to actually find a real message board.

Yahoo is the new AOL. People go there because they're too dumb to figure out how to go anywhere else.
LKBM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Best answer is wrong: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20060627074659AAP2xwa

That is somewhat rare, but it's quite common for questions to have lots and lots of obviously wrong answers posted, often the same one.

YA is better now that you can vote down any answer. Previously, you culd only vote for best answer and later vote it up or down. The crap answers earned the poster two points with no acountability.
smackfu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If you made a clone of Yahoo Answers using the Digg comment system, it would be a much better product.
appidydafoo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Yahoo Answers is a goddamn trainwreck, there is no traditional success story here. You could create any kind of Yahoo Tool and it will be judged as a success based on the myopic metrics of Yahoo Users - in other words, their market is built in.

AskMefi FTW
ouray, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why is there not a single link to http://answers.yahoo.com from that CNN article ? CNN does that all the time; they write an article about some website and then don't make it clickable ... I suppose they don't like people leaving their own website.
thund3rstruck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2While we're speaking of Dr Hawking, words cannot express how irritated I was when I saw the idiotic, inflammatory answers that people posted to his question. Here is one the world's most brilliant minds, the man responsible for bringing cosmology to the masses, and the majority of people felt compelled to answer; believe in jesus....
magicdan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Being honest to make this claim Yahoo have poured loads of their search engine traffic directly into Yahoo Answers. You can see a link on every search page of the engine, which is fine and the site is clearly providing a service but this isnt exactly to do with the ground breaking design / functionality.

Its just traffic being passed on & mostly users who couldnt find their answer of the crap search engine resuts.
ManuS, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It's not a great place for difficult questions and expert users. I've asked a few and never got a single good answer. Google Answers, on the other hand, (paid service) is great for such questions: http://answers.google.com/
- zydeco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Google Answers is seriously broken.
  
  I went through the entire process to become a Google Answers "researcher" about 4-5 years ago. Take 10 sample questions, write detailed answers, note references and searches, then get graded on your results. I probably spent 12-14 hours on my work. I got in. Whoopee!
  
  A few months later, Google decided to allow comments from non-researchers in the question's thread. People got so excited by participating that they were answering the questions in full in the COMMENTS AREA.
  
  Well, you'd think being a GAR, in a case like this you could just type "yeah, what he said, that checks out." and collect your cash. Well, no, Google replied. You need to add something of value to make the answer complete and collect your cash. You can't just steal someone else's work. Do no evil, right?
  
  So, in effect, Google allowed non-researchers to hijack the questions and lock the researchers out of answering them. Google got free traffic, the askers got their answer, and everyone was happy... I asked if researchers could have an exclusive period to work on questions before commenters jumped in. That was four years ago.
  
  I gave up on GA at that point, and haven't looked back.
  
  So screw 'em. Go go yahoo answers.
hamdi123, on 05/21/2008, -0/+0i created my own site after yahoo keep deleting my question
http://www.askgetanswer.com
hope you like it.
yahoo keep pissing me off
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The secret to Yahoo! Answers' success

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