Yahoo’s Answers

Posted on December 15, 2005 One Comment

Yahoo went live recently with Yahoo Answers. I’ve been mucking about with it this week and find it curiously fun. You can get a bit of an overview from Yahoo as I couldn’t decide what to quote…
Long story short though, folks can post questions, other folks can post answers to existing questions. Not unlike a mashup of usenet, web boards and chat rooms. I’ve yet to experience posting a question, but I’ve answered a bunch and even had positive responses to my answers (*preen*) Maybe that’s the part that keeps me coming back.

As it gets more traction I’m becoming a bit concerned about the signal to noise ratio though. I expect silly or frivolous questions will always be there, but as the week has progressed it seems like a higher percentage of them have cropped up.

My other beef, although not major, is that the categorization system is really rather rigid. There are topics and the topics have sub-topics. Well ok, but that’s all pre-defined… I wish they would have used a tag based system of some sort - or even a hybrid pre-defined/tag system. Would make it more interesting and fluid, imho.

All sorts of neat stuff there in the interface, a light dollop of Ajax spread throughout, and pretty easy to use. No real time commitment, you can just click over, look around and if nothing grabs you, move on. OH - and in a nifty feature, there are RSS feeds for individual questions if you want to subscribe to responses. Well, not just questions, but even topic areas. Nice! Give it a look and see what you think.