WebProNews

Yahoo promotes all sorts of things - options relating to search, shopping, and mail, among other subjects, are given the top spaces and bold boxes on its homepage.  But Yahoo Answers is near the top of a side column thanks to alphabetization, and new stats reveal that the service is extraordinarily popular.

 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.