Last time Google released a big list, we looked at how Google is getting better at not having to send users to other sites. This would all be an extension of that. Here are the answers-related changes from the new list:

• #83818. [project “Answers”] This change improved display of the movie showtimes feature.
• #83819. [project “Answers”] We improved display of the MLB search feature.
• #83820. [project “Answers”] This change improved display of the finance search feature.
• #83459. [project “Alternative Search Methods”] We added support for answers about new stock exchanges for voice queries.
• #83659. [project “Answers”] We made improvements to display of the local time search feature.
• #84063. [project “Answers”] We added better understanding of natural language searches for the calculator feature, focused on currencies and arithmetic.
• #83821. [project “Answers”] We introduced better natural language parsing for display of the conversions search feature.
• #84083. [project “Answers”] This change improved the display of the movie showtimes search feature.
• gresshoppe. [project “Answers”] We updated the display of the flight search feature for searches without a specified destination.
• #84068. [project “Answers”] We improved the display of the currency conversion search feature.
• #83391. [project “Answers”] This change internationalized and improved the precision of the symptoms search feature.

It’s probably worth noting that 10 out of 11 of those changes took place in August, so perhaps Google’s focus has shifted away from this area a little for the time being.

With that, the company has released its top questions and answers for 2010. This provides a more interesting picture of people’s interests this year in some ways. While Ask doesn’t have near the market share of a Google or even a Bing, the Q&A format tends to provide a bit more context than just keywords. 

"With live people now addressing user questions, we see not only what people want to know, but real-time answers on a wide scope of issues and topics," said Doug Leeds, President of Ask.com US. "It’s a freeze frame on the current mindset of consumers, focused on everything from products and brands to culture and politics."

Here are Ask’s Top 10 questions and answers for the year:

1. What is the best coffee under $10? Users say: Dunkin Donuts

10. What’s the best new TV show? Users say: The Big Bang Theory

Ask also provided top ten lists for the most popular questions answered in a few verticles like entertainment, tech, and health. Unfortunately, answers weren’t included in these lists. Some of them are probably quite amusing.  

Here are Ask’s top entertainment questions:

1. How old is Justin Bieber?

10. Is Demo Lovato in rehab?

Top Technology/Internet Questions:

1. What is the best brand of laptop?

10. Where can I download free music?

Top Health and Fitness Questions:

1. How much should I weigh?

10. What are the symptoms of the swine flu?

Ask says it has been the fourth largest Internet property for unique searches, attracting 90 million monthly unique users. 

This round of funding might be particularly significant for the company. "We believe this latest round provides ChaCha the cash required to reach profitability," says CEO Scott A. Jones.

Over the past four years, since its inception, ChaCha has raised about $52 million from prominent tech leaders, venture capitalists, and angel investors. The company says its text service passed Google in mobile text traffic in Q3 2009. According to ChaCha, when the company’s mobile service launched in January 2008, Google SMS had nearly 100% of he mobile text search market, but ChaCha now has more text traffic, coming from users mostly under the age of 25.

That may be why ChaCha is considering itself the "#1 way for advertisers to reach teens and young adults on their mobile phones."

"Given that we started our mobile text service less than 2 years ago, that also makes us the fastest-growing mobile text service that provides advertisers with a way to reach elusive teens and young adults," says Jones. " We have been monetizing from national brands and local businesses who want to be ‘in the conversation.’  We have provided a successful advertising venue for brands, including The CW Network, IKEA, Paramount Pictures, McDonald’s, Palm, Coca Cola, AT&T, J&J, P&G, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and hundreds of other businesses."

"ChaCha acts as a ‘smart friend’ to answer any question via text (or voice, iPhone, or twitter), particularly from college-age and high school-age students," adds Mr. Jones.  "While many headlines frequently report ‘mobile web’ search traffic stats, the reality is that ‘smart phones’ represent less than 20% of phones that are in users’ hands today (iPhones represent about 6%).  For the vast majority of mobile phone users, the common denominator of texting, which works on virtually all phones, is the more universal way to get answers.  Interestingly, our new iPhone app gets MORE engagement from users than our mobile text service, which leads us to believe that ChaCha will be even more successful as smart phones (iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, etc…) continue to proliferate."

Between its mobile and online services, ChaCha has answered over 300 million questions in the past two years. The company cites data from Quantcast, which indicate it gets over 10 million unique monthly visitors in the US.

Related Articles:

> Need Answers? Text ChaCha!

> ChaCha Gets Extra-Important $10M In Funding

> ChaCha Receives $6 Million To Keep Dancing

If it is showing up for you, it is located between Groups and Knol on Google’s "More Google Products" page:

According to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Google Guru is a product that was launched in Russia back in 2007. While here in the U.S., the link pointing to Google Guru goes nowhere, the Russian link Schwartz provides goes to something that looks like this:

It’s basically a question and answers site. "What is interesting is that Google closed down their Google Answers site back in November 2006, yes over three years ago," says Schwartz. "Is Google Guru their way of getting back into the social Q&A space? Yahoo is dominate right now with Yahoo Answers, maybe Google feels they can make a run at that as well?"

Apparently not everyone is seeing the link to Google Guru at this point, and Google hasn’t at this time made any announcements about it that we are aware of. I expect that will change soon enough. Are you seeing the link?

Related Articles:

> Google Reportedly Considering Yelp Acquisition

> Google’s Blogger Adds Amazon Affiliate Monetization Option

> Google Puts Universal Search in Suggestions, Launches Quick Scroll

Ask has an interesting blog post up interpreting this data, and the gist of it is summed up with this paragraph from it:

In a nutshell, users are now expecting search engines to not just index the Internet, they are expecting search engines to process the data on the Internet. Searchers don’t consider their query to be just keywords; they are starting to expect that the search engine will understand the intent of the query better. Expressing a query with intent requires more words, and the user’s investment of more words means that his or her expectations on the search engine are higher. We are clearly experiencing a transition in the way that people are using the Internet.

Intent-based search. We’ve been hearing the phrase dropped more and more. In a popular WebProNews interview with Bruce Clay, late last year, he spoke of where search was headed and a good deal of that had to do with personalized search. The SearchWiki side of that has gotten the most attention in this area, but he had some things to say about intent-based search as well.

He talked about Google looking up your IP and revising results based on it while making assumptions about the intent of your search. This would have an affect on SEO, obviously. "The page that ranks for a shopping query is an entirely different architecture than the page that ranks for a research query," said Clay.

It’s a topic SEOBook author Aaron Wall and I discussed recently as well. Aaron noted that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent conference call, "Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that [we] are going to roll out in the next little while."

Get Him to the Greek (2010)
Fair Game (2010)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Iron Man 2 (2010)
The Last Airbender (2010)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I (2010)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
Robin Hood (2010)
Toy Story 3 (2010)
The A-Team (2010)
The Spy Next Door (2010)
The idea of relevancy based on intent is a fantastic one, but chances are the search engines are still going to have to rely on the content that users create to increase search relevancy, at least in this manner. Google still has "a long way to go to get where they want to be with relevancy, but some of the issue of search is simply creating the incentive to make people want to create the content that really answers search queries well in a good format," Wall told WebProNews.

"Sometimes I see Matt Cutts post great how to posts about how to do different things in Ubuntu," he continued. "I believe he does that in part to feed answers into the search engine, especially if/when it did not provide an answer that was as good as he would like."

What is another great way to feed answers into a search engine? Keith Hogan, VP, Technology at Ask offers a piece of pretty sound advice for online businesses: "Web business should take notice of Question/Answering sites that have been built and SEO’d to fill the search engine rankings for these types of user questions (e.g. Q&A aggregators like WikiAnswers, AnswerBag, and Yahoo Answers). While this content is generally very relevant, content directly from companies could be more authoritative. Web businesses may benefit by creating FAQ content that is targeted at answering real user questions about their products."

FAQs as relevant results to intent-based searches about what your business offers. What a concept. And considering the emphasis Google seems to be putting on brand (although Matt Cutts says it’s not so much about brand exactly), it sounds like a can’t-miss.

As Mike McDonald of WebProNews suggested around New Year’s, look for more intent-based stuff coming from Microsoft as well, as it rebrands its search engine. That is what the company’s acquisition of Powerset was all about.

In concluding, let me work in two clichéd (but true) statements. Content is king and the " Internet is a cesspool." If only the entire world could work together to build quality content and clean it up, the web (or at least Google’s search results) would be a more relevant place. So which one will happen first, that or world peace?

 

Wolfram is a British physicist, mathematician and businessman known most for his computer algebra system Mathematica and his controversial book A New Kind of Science.

Unlike other answers sites, the answers from Wolfram Alpha will not be retrieved from a database, and unlike what search engines are trying to do, they will not be retrieved based on natural language. They will be retrieved through math and science. Wolfram explains on his blog:

Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.

But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable…

…I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work.

Not exactly a Google-Killer…

Some present Wolfram Alpha as a possible Google-killer. Others don’t, but think its importance could equal that of Google, and suggest that Google could potentially be interested in acquiring it.

Personally, I have to wonder if this will affect Wikipedia use more than Google use. From the sound of it, it won’t eliminate the need for Wikipedia either, as that site will still be of use for collections of information, biographies, etc. But for those looking for direct facts, it could put a dent in Wikipedia’s queries – if it catches on.

Can Users Trust Computers for Accuracy?

As with Wikipedia, the trust factor comes into play. Most people know they can’t trust everything they read on the Internet, and if Wolfram Alpha presents users with a single definitive answer to their question, there is a good chance many will still turn to Google to doublecheck accuracy. At least with a list of results, you can check different sources and make your own conclusion as to what information is accurate.

Another reason that this won’t kill Google is that Google and other major search engines are already moving toward intent-based search results. Plus, searchers are using longer queries and revising them to find the answers they are looking for (this is one reason why FAQ pages are encouraged for sites). Even searching for answers to questions, I believe people will be reluctant to part with the familiarity of the Google brand, which dominates so much of the search market share.

Wolfram says the project will never be finished, but he’s almost ready to launch the first part of it. Wolfram Alpha will go live in May. Then we can see what the hype’s really all about.

The good news: the dead links aren’t a fresh feature (it seemed possible that this was an attempt to cut down on spam- and malware-related stuff).  On the Yahoo Answers Blog, "Lou" stated, "We are working to fix the problem and we don’t yet have an estimate on when it will be done.  Sorry for the inconvenience – we will keep you posted."

Unfortunately, Lou wrote that yesterday afternoon (hat tip to Barry Schwartz for covering it very early this morning), and user-provided links within Yahoo Answers still don’t work.  Many folks weren’t too fond of these live links, anyway – think of the spam- and malware-related issues mentioned a moment ago – but others are unhappy about what happened.

"People A" wrote, "I had a lot of good link lists to resolved question best answer links are disabled.  It is too bad and may cause a lot of people to leave YA.  Some information is difficult to find and links are a good source of information sometimes."

We can’t, in all seriousness, suggest that this issue will have any impact on the Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition (and Microsoft’s falling stock price is effectively lowering its offer, anyway).  Yet the problem makes Yahoo look all the more pathetic, and that’s one area in which the company didn’t need any help.

When we first covered Yahoo Answers in its December 2005 debut, we saw a striking similarity to Usenet. Instead of newsgroups, Yahoo provided Answers with web-based tools for asking questions, providing answers, and rating the responses questions received.

Yahoo Answers proved so successful that even Google could not compete with the service and shuttered their competitor at the end of 2006.

The appeal of Yahoo Answers drew the interest of researchers at Stanford. Resource Shelf picked up on their paper, Questioning Yahoo! Answers.

The researchers cited the rise of various forms of social media sites, like Flickr, Facebook, and StumbleUpon, and attempts by Microsoft and Amazon.com to mimic the success of Yahoo Answers with their services.

Among their findings, the researchers tell us some topics are more popular that others. From August 2005, the start of testing with Yahoo Answers (it did not open to the public until December 2005) through May 2006, Love & Romance proved the most popular topic, followed by Entertainment. The least popular topics were of a local nature: Dining Out, and Local Businesses.

When it came to participation, the same pattern seen in social media happened with Yahoo Answers. People were more interested in receiving than giving, according to the researchers:

Overall, we observe three interesting phenomena in user behavior. First, the majority of users are askers, a phenomenon partly explained by the role of the system: Yahoo! Answers is a place to “ask questions”.

Second, only a small fraction of these users gets involved in answering questions or providing feedback (votes). Hence, it seems that a large number of users are keen only on “receiving” from rather than “giving” to others. Third, there is a small portion of the user population that provides answers or votes.

They also noted the difference in the amount of participation, depending on the topic:

General, lighter, topics, which interest a large population, such as Love & Romance, attract many inquiries. On the other hand, topics that do not require expert opinions, such as Social Science, or that can be answered based on personal experience, such as Pregnancy & Parenting, attract many answers.

The researchers noted a lot of ‘noise’ in the current iteration of Yahoo Answers. They suggested what a more ideal question-answering system should do for its users:

Ideally, it should facilitate users finding answers to their information needs and experts providing answers. That means easily finding an answer that is already in the system as an answer to a similar question, and making it possible for users to ask (focused) questions and get (useful) answers, minimizing noise.

Their recommendation may be in practice already, at a site they did not mention in their paper. We have seen the model in action at Answerbag, which does try to route people to existing answers based on their questions.

The folks at Resource Shelf also noted another omission in the research paper. "We wonder if the researchers were aware of library virtual reference services and how they compare to what Yahoo Answers provides?" they asked.

Yahoo UK’s Dan Peters said on the Yahoo Search blog the company has integrated Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Music with Bebo. He also noted how socializing has changed as people use the web as a networking tool.

Yahoo’s popular Answers joined the new application platform at Bebo. A module on a Bebo user’s profile allow them to ask and answer questions directly from Bebo. People can publish their questions and answers to the module to share them with friends.

Three channels of Yahoo Music – Rock, Urban, and Top Music – offer Bebo users the opportunity to subscribe to videos. They can add favorite songs to their Bebo profiles and see who their friends think is hot right now.

At its core, the deal provides Yahoo with brand reinforcement beyond its search product, already on the Bebo site. If successful, this gives Yahoo the chance to maintain mindshare with the young, entertainment-savvy networking crowd on Bebo.

If that leads to Bebo members signing on for other Yahoo services, or simply spending some time off Bebo on Yahoo properties, Yahoo benefits from the ad presentations they make during those times.

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Richard Gerstein, SVP and chief marketing officer at Sears, says the Internet has a bigger role than in past years. The retailer has partnered with Yahoo to launch a holiday themed social networking site that includes the use of widgets, text messaging, alerts to customers and promotions.

The social networking site "Where Wishes Begin" will allow users to vote on gift ideas, use Yahoo Answers to solve gift- giving issues, share video and photos of gift-giving reactions via Yahoo’s photo sharing community Flickr.

"Sears will have a much larger online presence this holiday," said Gerstein. "The online space continues to offer new and exciting ways to interact in a meaningful way with our customers, such as the holiday experience we have created with Yahoo.com."

Sears is also allowing shoppers to make purchases online and pick them up at stores. The program will expand after Thanksgiving to provide curbside service for select products being delivered to a customer’s vehicle within five minutes of arriving at the store.