Yahoo announced today that Yahoo Answers has served its billionth answer.

"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.