"From the small beginnings when we received our first answer from the public back in December 2005 we have now become the largest and most popular global Q&A site on the internet, available in 9 languages across 21 countries," says the Yahoo Answers Team. "The volume of contributions we receive from the Answers community on a daily basis is mindboggling."

Besides having served its billionth answer, Yahoo revealed a few more interesting stats:

- 823,966 questions and answers per day

- 34,331 per hour or 572 per minute

- 10 questions and answers posted EVERY second

- Most popular question ever was from Hillary Clinton who received over 38,000 answers to "Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?" Oprah had a question with 37,000 responses.

The billionth answer came from a user going by cgramer2, who answered the question " What laptop part can I replace to speed up my pc?"

A billion answers is a lot of answers. I wonder what fraction of those were actually helpful to the users who asked the questions.

Yahoo Answers may have the biggest Q&A site now. It will be interesting to see if this remains as the Q&A space gets more crowded, and social media and mobile play bigger roles in the lives of consumers. Other noteworthy competitors include Ask.com (which is putting more of a focus on Q&A), Demand Media’s Answerbag, which has entered an interesting partnership with MerchantCircle for local businesses, ChaCha, which is also keeping local businesses in mind, and Aardvark, which was recently purchased by Google, to name a few. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter certainly play a large role in getting questions answered as well.

MerchantCircle has had a pre-existing partnership with Demand Media that functions in several capacities. For one, Demand’s domain registrar is used to give MerchantCircle businesses domains that MerchantCircle recommends based on their business profile. In addition, Demand Media content appears on merchant sites. For example, a plumber may have plumbing-related content from Demand Media on his site to make it more relevant and useful to users. Now, there is a new element to the partnership – Q&A.

Demand Media’s AnswerBag is a Q&A site, and the 122nd most popular site on the Internet, according to Merchant Circle. Now, AnswerBag questions will be routed to MerchantCircle businesses to answer when appropriate. This way, in theory, if a person asks a plumbing question, it will go to a plumber, and make for a more helpful and relevant answer. In turn, the MerchantCircle business (the plumber) will get more exposure, credit for answering (which can enhance the appearance of credibility), and even links – so businesses have an incentive to answer questions.

"The more you’re able to show off your expertise online the more likely you are to get more business," Waddell tells WebProNews. Through the partnership, MerchantCircle is basically providing greater distribution of the answer given. Plus there’s another perk: potential search engine traffic. "We’re a really good complement for SEO-savvy businesses to help people get more exposure on Google or other search engines," says Wadell. "A good complement that can help get them more traffic."

The AnswerBag deal isn’t the only piece of news. They also announced a partnership with HelloMetro, a company with hyperlocal sites for over 1,000 cities, serving between 4 and 5 million unique visitors a month. MerchantCircle will power its directories. 

MerchantCircle is also now leveraging the Yahoo Answers API to introduce even more questions to its merchants. They’re taking questions from Yahoo Answers and introducing them to merchants. They say they take only really relevant questions that pertain to categories that are strong in merchant’s circle, and again, merchants can get more links. If you go to a merchant’s listing page, you’ll see all the questions they’ve answered. You can see what they’re experts in, which can be a strong selling point for a business.

Q&A search is getting to be a big business these days. Even Google has recognized this, as evidenced by its recent acquisition of Aardvark. MerchantCircle has put an interesting spin on it that seemingly offers a fair amount of potential for businesses to capitalize on. With these partnerships, that potential should only grow.

A Yahoo spokesperson emailed WebProNews to say, "In the past year, Yahoo! Answers has grown from 129.6 million to 177.8 million monthly unique visitors worldwide – a 37% year over year increase."  Also, "Yahoo! Answers receives an average of 173,000 questions and 1.1 million answers a day globally."

 

Toss in the fact (as verified by comScore) that "Yahoo! Answers users spent over a billion minutes (1.05 billion) on the site in March 2009," and you get a picture of a pretty impressive operation.

Then there’s MSN QnA, which didn’t even make it out of beta.  The post publicizing its death implied that Microsoft will remain interested in questions and answers, but instead of announcing some new product, just went on to explain how QnA community members can use Live Search and stay in touch through Windows Live or different message boards.

Yahoo may be having a bit of trouble on the search and advertising fronts, but it’s continuing to clean up in this one field.

 Yahoo Answers

Matt McGee found that Yahoo Answers pulled in four million new American users between August of 2007 and March of 2008, and 40 million users worldwide in the same period.  Also, the site received 77 million and 150 million new answers from those two groups, respectively.

It’s a stretch, yet if all of Yahoo could grow at this pace, Microsoft might be the one trying not to get acquired.

Furthermore, Jun Zhang, a University of Michigan School of Information doctoral graduate, recently presented a study on Yahoo Answers while in Beijing.  The research delved into what sorts of questions are asked, what sorts of answers are given, patterns between the two, and all other types of things.  A key point, though, is that a group of academics with connections to both Michigan and China bothered to study Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo Answers may not get top billing, but it certainly seems worth keeping an eye on, and Yahoo might do well to try a little cross-promotion.

The most visited website within the Questions and Answers category last week was Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com), which received 74.05 percent of the market share of U.S. visits. Wiki.Answers.com was the second most visited website receiving 18.35 percent of visits, followed by Answerbag.com, which received 4.42 percent of visits. WikiAnswers, launched in June 2007 has seen its U.S. visits increase 125 percent comparing the week ending Jun. 9, 2007 versus Mar. 15, 2008.

Labels: Yahoo

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As part of the promotional effort for the campaign, Yahoo has several activities planned. One of them builds on the wildly popular Yahoo Answers, and features a question from Speaker Pelosi: ‘Congress is working on legislation to address global warming – what would you like to see included?’

At press time, 15,231 answers had been posted by Yahoo users in response. Participants who have their answer picked as a

Yahoo Answers has some explaining to do.

Over the past several months, I’ve asked 13 questions on the site, as at first I was impressed by the community response. My most recent question asked for help in getting a Slingbox to work, since it won’t work with the Ambit wireless modem I have with Time Warner Cable (as an aside, please let me know if you’ve had similar issues and know if it’s hopeless or if there’s a fix; I’m about ready to send back the Slingbox). This question on the Slingbox, and four others, have recently been removed by Yahoo Answers, apparently for violating its community guidelines.

The other questions included such "offensive" material such as:

* Wondering what others thought of a certain TV show (and a PG show on basic cable, for what it’s worth)

* How people value inbound links for SEO, in doing research for a recent column

* Seeking the best vacation guide anyone has seen in Yahoo Travel

* Asking for any insight into a business service, as someone asked me what I thought of it and I hadn’t heard of it

Eight other questions remain on the site, for now. Though it’s possible they’ll be gone too, including one seeking help in changing a setting on my Motorola KRAZR phone. Why that’s up and my Slingbox question is down makes no sense to me whatsoever. But what do I know?

I tried emailing Yahoo through a link in its help materials, but the page was down. I also posted a message in their forums. I’m not expecting an adequate response, but I’d love to hear from others in the blogging community if they’ve faced similar problems. There are dozens of other Q&A services out there, and if Yahoo gets trigger happy with filtering, then it won’t dominate this category indefinitely.

I’ve also included my interpretation of their wallpaper below (click to enlarge).

Comments

For a company that often finds itself dwelling within the enormity of Google’s shadow, Yahoo still has isolated bright spots that it can boast. Both Yahoo Finance and Brand Universes have been met with critical acclaim from analysts and praise from online communities across the Internet, but its singular most effective venture at the moment may just be Yahoo Answers.

Recently, the Answers service added some basic social features such as “starring” which generated a lot of buzz throughout the blogosphere. As the community as continued to grow and become more enthused about personal information sharing, Yahoo has stepped up to the plate and transformed its simple Q&A service into a full fledged social network.

More info on the changes from the Yahoo Search Blog:

We just added a new capability to Answers, the Yahoo! Answers Network – currently in beta, which enables you to build your own personal knowledge network. So what exactly is a knowledge network? Simply put, it enables you to directly connect with people whose knowledge you value so you can easily share knowledge and discover interesting information on topics you care about.

Wow. I like it. The whole “personal knowledge network” philosophy sits very well with me; it really gives an individual the opportunity to showcase their own unique personality in a novel way – by allowing their online buddies to see what issues and topics are most important to them.

Since making the switch to Gmail, I must admit I haven’t made use of any Yahoo services, but I must confess to you that creating an Answers profile has quickly moved to the top of the list of my online priorities. Kudos, Yahoo.

First we need to point out that Yahoo has its Widget Engine all ready for Vista. The application formerly known as Konfabulator runs just fine on Microsoft’s latest operating system, with some 3,700 widgets available for download.

On the charitable side, Yahoo teamed with Unicef for a ten-day celebrity-studded awareness building campaign. Through Yahoo Answers, celebrities from film, TV, music and sports will ask questions of Yahoo’s users to build awareness of children’s issues throughout the world.

Actors Lucy Liu, Lawrence Fishburne, Alyssa Milano, Danny Glover, and Tea Leoni, musicians Clay Aiken and India Arie, NBA star Elton Brand, and celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson have been listed as celebrity participants for the program, which runs from today through February 9th.

The opening question, “What can we do to get more Americans committed to supporting programs that help children?”, comes from singer and Unicef Ambassador Clay Aiken. Nearly 2,000 answers have been posted in response already; they range from thoughtful to useless, with answers in the latter category being voted down by users in favor of exposing the better ones in the thread.

Quite a few responses made early on touched on a similar idea: increase awareness of Unicef and its mission. There are a number of worthy causes people can support. If they only know Unicef from the Trick Or Treat coin collecting done each Halloween, that means there is room for people to learn more.

The Yahoo Answers campaign should be a good start toward educating more people, since Yahoo draws so much online traffic, and its Answers service has become a popular stop for users ever since its debut in December 2005.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.