Yahoo Answers opens

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Yahoo!, Freeware

Yahoo Answers opens

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Dec 8th 2005

Looking for an answer? Yahoo extends its web service offerings with the brand-new Yahoo Answers (in beta, of course). Unlike Google Answers, where you tell a Google employee how much you'd pay for an answer (which sounds totally goofy to me), Yahoo's service is free. Gary Price over at SearchEngineWatch has a full rundown and chat with Ofer Shaked, Director of Engineering for Yahoo Search. Ofer reminds us that, as a beta, anything is possible for future changes. But for now, essentially anyone can post a question about anything, and have the Yahoo community answer. Points are awarded for answering, and new users aren't allowed to post a zillion questions at once. While there are some safeguards, I did find it funny that the top question on the page I'm looking at is, "Do penis exercises really work?" A nice twist to all this is the ability to vote on undecided questions, like the debate around "how much wood could a woodchuck chuck?" Take it for a spin and let us know what you get answered... Except those exercises— I really don't want to know.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

submachine said 12:50AM on 12-09-2005

Reminds me of knowpost.com and abuzz.com; free advice, great communites, had to shut down after the dot-com implosion.

This is why Yahoo beats Google.

Devon said 9:49AM on 12-09-2005

This service has been in Yahoo! Taiwan for a while (and not beta) already, and has been fairly popular, although the point system annoys me, because when people start fighting over those points, we may not always have the best quality answer.

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