AOL Acquires Questions and Answer Service Yedda, Inc., announces the AOL press center, just one week after purchasing contextual ad company Quigo, AOL scoops up Yedda Inc, a people-powered, quester & answer service.

Yedda’s semantic matching technology intelligently routes questions to relevant communities of Internet users who can "syndicate" their expertise and spark a community-wide dialogue of people invited to discuss and learn from each other’s experiences.

Ron Grant, President and COO of AOL, said, "In the course of our daily lives we often leverage the experience and expertise of friends, colleagues and professionals like doctors and lawyers to get answers to questions we have. Incorporating Yedda’s unique technology into AOL enables us to bring together our traditional search resources and an entire community of people to help users quickly find answers to questions."

On the other hand, Avichay Nissenbaum, CEO and Co-founder of Yedda said, "We are excited about joining the AOL family. The services and technologies our team developed are a perfect fit with the AOL strategy. We will continue to empower knowledge communities throughout the Web, directly and through our network of partnerships, and we’re looking forward to weaving our unique value into the various AOL properties."

Comment …

Yedda is a question-and-answer service that’s seen a reasonable amount of success since its 2006 launch.  Yedda’s price tag remains unknown, yet since it’s raised about $2.5 million in funding, the service probably wasn’t too cheap.

That’s interesting, since AOL is supposed to be focusing on Platform A (which relates to advertising).  The acquisition of Quigo fed into this drive, but the additional purchase of Yedda doesn’t seem to relate.  So, despite fairly stunning losses (subscription revenues are down by 56 percent) and heavy layoffs, AOL’s not giving up on every non-advertising option.

Instead, it seems willing to go up against services like Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers.  In reference to Yedda, Michael Arrington notes, “[T]hey also partner with others to power independent Q&A services as well.  There are more than fifty partners working with Yedda now – example partners are ePals and The JobNetwork.  Yedda says those partners now drive 90% of their total traffic.”

If AOL’s dreams come true, those partners will also drive some fresh revenue to its door.