Is Yahoo Answers Really the Answer?
Aug. 18, 2006 — -- The Internet is full of answers.
For some, though, the answers are so plentiful and the information spread out across so many Web pages, that it may be better to leave some questions unanswered.
While some people fumble around the Web, wandering aimlessly in search of information, others are wizards with a search engine and can track down the most elusive of facts with little effort.
One solution that's been tried and retried over the years is "social search," calling on the collective knowledge of the Internet's inhabitants to answer questions posed by other members of the Web community.
While destinations like controversial encyclopedia site Wikipedia.com, Google Answers, and others have tried to tap into the wisdom of the Web, a service from the people who brought us the Yahoo search engine and Web portal -- Yahoo Answers -- is getting a lot of buzz as social search realized.
Others are not convinced. They see the site as just another seedy forum for the Internet's foulmouthed and lewd miscreants to post sophomoric questions and even more juvenile responses.
The goal, says Tomi Poutanen, director of Yahoo's social search products, is to complement what Yahoo already does: search.
"What that means is really tapping into the half a billion Yahoo users who are [registered] at Yahoo and providing them with a forum to share their knowledge," he said.
Yahoo Answers, like similar sites before it and since, assumes that a group of people can do a better job of finding information on the Internet than a single person alone or even the best of search engines.
Anyone registered with the site can ask or answer a question, which opens the door to some pretty outrageous posts, but anything truly offensive can be reported by the site's users and Yahoo can ban or penalize that poster.
"It captures the living knowledge of the Yahoo community," Poutanen said. "It's a much more dynamic environment than a search engine."
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