Ask.com Opens Up Its Human Q&A Community, Steps Further Away From Search, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Sep 1)
Ask.com, once the home of Jeeves, is much more QnA with volunteers and much less search.
It will do a web search using Google, but it's promoting its Q&A - a new tab is for "Ask People". It can't answer the question - why do people use ask.com?
Quora Launches Browse Feature To Help Users Find Related Content, Greg Finn, Search Engine Land (Aug 10)
Time to look at Quora.
"Over the past few months, Quora has been rolling out a variety of new features to help improve the experience on the social question and answer site. The newest element is a browse page that joins Shuffle (launched in June) and Topic Pages (launched in July). "
Quora, the Social Questions & Answers Service, Reaches a Tipping Point, Praized Blog (Jan 5)
This blogger likes the QnA service at Quora. Ask a question, get answers, have followers. It has been said that Quora will become bigger than Twitter. Must join it to use.
Ask to Introduce New Q&A Engine Soon, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Jul 15)
Ask.com has announced a Q&A search that is more social to be launched July 29.
On July 29th, Ask will announce a brand new product aimed at delivering the best answers to people’s questions through a unique hybrid approach (think: a little bit search, a little bit social) that is not available on the Web today.
Greg Sterling mentions several other Q&A services and notes "none of these so far (we haven’t see Facebook’s) have quite “gotten it right” in my opinion. "
Sometimes a Q&A can have answers but the questions have to be something someone would bother to answer (meaning the popular, consumer oriented, and sometimes technical), and you have to be able to plow through the nonsense.
It's hard to believe that this is the thing that will revive Ask.com
Also - IAC To Put The Ask Back In Ask.com On July 29th (IACI), SF Chronicle (Jul 15)
Answers.com Starts Answering Questions On Twitter, Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch (Apr 20)
"One of the biggest Q&A sites on the Web, Answers.com, now offers answers to anyone who Tweets a question to @answersdotcom. (The @answers account is owned by Mahalo, which has its own rival social Q&A service on Twitter which routes questions to humans). When you Tweet a question to @answersdotcom, you get a reply almost immediately which is the top answer from the site, or from WikiAnswers, which it also owns."
They’ve got answers, you’ve got questions., Charles Knight, The Next Web (Feb
There are several services on the Web where - "You ask a human a question and a) a human answers you, or b) their machine answers you."
No mention of library services.
Yahoo Answers Gets A New Look, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Feb 25)
Yahoo is rolling out a new look and interface that will improve navigation at Yahoo Answers.
The surprising line in this posting is - "Hitwise has previously said that Yahoo Answers is the number two reference site online, behind Wikipedia."
Web Searches on a Hunch, Business Week
Video with Caterina Fake on Hunch - a new service that "helps people make decisions by asking them a series of questions and comparing their answers to others". Caterina Fake co-founded Flickr - so she has a knack for new Web uses.
Full article - Hunch: The Search for Better Search
"Hunch arrives at a response after asking users about five to 10 questions. Going a step beyond Yahoo's community-voting model, Hunch determines the best response for each individual user based on their past clicks. The site has voluntary survey questions on its front page, in the section "teach Hunch about you," where it asks simple, fun questions and then factors in those preferences when it's advising you on a decision."
To Do: Join Hunch, let it get to know you through its questions, and then ask it questions.