Yahoo Answers Opens in UK
Yahoo has expanded its incredibly popular and successful social media reference offering, Yahoo Answers, into the UK today. Unlike traditional search, Yahoo Answers is based upon human generated answers to queries by its registered members.
Stephen Taylor, head of search and search marketing at Yahoo! Europe, told The Guardian: “We do see our core internet search and social search getting closer and closer together. Essentially, what you are building is a global knowledge database.”
e-consultancy covers the UK launch and unearths an interesting fact about Yahoo Answers : research group Comscore says Yahoo Answers second only to Wikipedia in usage of online reference tools.
Being second to only Wikipedia as a human powered ‘reference’ tool is a fairly hefty quote and this writer wonders if the voting based Yahoo Q&A service will one day take over the helm as the most used and contributed to destination for human generated fact (or what we perceive as close enough to fact to publish).
With 50 million members at Yahoo Answers and a new Answers preview integrated into the Yahoo Search Results, seems like they are only at the tip of the iceberg.
And how’s Google Answers doing with their Google Answers service?
In contrast to Google Answers, which uses a team of 500 “carefully-screened” researchers to provide paid-for information, Yahoo’s service allows anyone to submit answers and doesn’t charge those who submit queries.
According to Comscore, Yahoo Answers attracted 12.3 million unique visitors in June, while 947,000 people clicked on Google Answers.
