We put Yahoo Answers, Amazon's Askville, and rival question-and-answer services to the test.
Everyone knows a lot about something, whether it's quasars, quilting, or crayons. But the converse is also true: there are a lot of things that most people know nothing about. And unfortunately, that doesn't seem to stop them from sharing their opinions.
That's one lesson I took away from my recent survey of the growing collection of social question-and-answer websites, where members can post questions, answer other members' questions, and rate other members' answers to their questions--all for free. The Wikipedia-like, quintessentially Web 2.0 premise of these ventures--which include Yahoo Answers, Microsoft's Live QnA, AnswerBag, Yedda, Wondir, and Amazon's new Askville--is that the average citizen is an untapped well of wisdom.
But it takes a lot of sifting to get truly useful information from these sites. Each boasts a core of devoted members who leave thorough and well-documented answers to the questions they deem worthy. And most of the sites have systems for rating the performance or experience of answerers, which makes it easier to assess their reliability, while also inspiring members to compete with one another to give the best answers. But not all of the Q&A sites do this equally well; after all, the companies that run these sites are selling advertising space, not information.
In an attempt to flush out the best of the bunch, I've spent the past few days trying to identify what unique advantages each one offers. I also devised a diabolically difficult, two-part test. First, I searched each site's archive for existing answers to the question "Is there any truth to the five-second rule?" (I meant the rule about not eating food after it's been on the floor for more than five seconds, not the basketball rule about holding.)
Second, I posted the same two original questions at each site: "Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?" and "What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich?" The first question called for factual, historical answers, while the second simply invited people to share their favorite sandwich-making methods and recipes. I awarded each site up to three points for the richness and originality of its features, and up to three points for the quality of the answers to my three questions, for a total of 12 possible points.
The Results:
1. AnswerBag
2. Askville
3. Live QnA
4. Wondir
5. Yahoo Answers
6. Yedda
Guest (lary999)
Google Answers, DIY Forums, Angie's List
So much for fluff. Why not write a follow-up article with a more serious tone, one that provides some useful information? For example, I use Google Answers, DIY Forums, Angie's List, etc., depending on the nature of the question. Experts are quite often eager to provide excellent information
I'm sure there are many sites that would prove useful to TR readers.
For some reason the scope of this review is limited only to a small subset of many Q&A sites created in the last four years, while the sites like this exist since 1998 at least. It is not clear how and why these particular six sites were selected. As a result, the review doesn't even attempt to address the question posed by its title. None of the sites reviewed innovated a concept of a Q&A site. I am looking forward to a higher quality review on this topic that includes experts-exchange, 3form, and kin.naver.
It's a great idea to do a mature, intelligent evaluation of information-providing web sites. Unfortuantely, this is not one. This reminds me of car magazine articles that proclaim to find the best sports car by comparing a toyota and a honda. Sells magazines, idiots are happy. But has nothing to do with a real effort that would satisfy intellgent people. Glad I let my subscription to Tech Review lapse.
I would have to agree with this comment. I posted a review of this review, if you will, here:
http://joeldowns.com/2007/01/12/mit-tech-review-go-back-to-journalism-school/
www.BitWine.com - a new bread of answers sites
Dear Wade
Your review was interesting; I wanted to raise the issues of Urgency, Privacy and Trust. One of your comments was “two and a half days after I posted the question--I had received only one answer”.
Yahoo fixed that problem to some extent, and made it faster their game like point system and levels is effective.
By urgency, I refer to the simple question of where do you go to answer problems that require instant answers. Questions with your office software that refuses to print your market data for a report due yesterday, or your kid’s health.
Privacy has to do with - How public do you want your personal problem to be?
Trust, is all about knowing who provided the answer for my life savings investment question.
BitWine www.BitWine.com represents a new bread of answers sites. BitWine is a site where people do not search for the answer, but rather for the person with the knowledge to answer.
We provide Rich Media Platform that provides people the tools to express themselves in words hand gestures, voice, pictures with no limit on question space and without wasting time on phrasing the question. (All based on the popular Skype software)
All the Q&A process is done Directly and Discreetly one-on-one with a live Advisor.
The Voice & Video and the Advisor’s advertised Resume, as well as our Ranking system, provides the Client (the Asker) with a quick way of establishing initial trust in the person answering. In other words you can see that it is not a teenage kid explaining to you how to invest your life savings just because he got addicted to answering questions and collecting points.
The last aspect is really the quality of the advice. As you saw with your five seconds rule question, people just do not have the context to answer a short unconnected question. Writing a long question is also not a solution since it almost guarantees that only few people will even try to answer.
If you ask a business related question on most of the sites mentioned, as I have done, the likelihood of receiving any relevant answer becomes slim.
By introducing pay-per-time system BitWine attracts Advisors that have the knowledge to answer this higher level of questions, with higher level of expertise.
If you look around, you can see that Information is essentially free, yet Knowledge is not, specifically when a people do not have the time or the tools to derive the knowledge they need from the free available information out there.
Knowledge is something people acquire over the span of a lifetime, in most cases not in seconds over a tag search. Finding the person with the sufficient knowledge that can customize its existing know-how to a specific problem at hand, for an individual that needs a fast solution, was really the challenge we came to solve with BitWine.
There are some interesting successful companies like Nitron (www.NitronAdvisors.com) operating in the Enterprise level. They provide search services to help investors for instance find the correct experts. BitWine extends that concept to individuals like me and you.
Thanks
Alon Cohen
Co-Founder of BitWine
Naive to the point of dangerous
I was a long-time subscriber to the print edition of MIT Technology Review and this piece is nowhere near their standards for thoughtful analysis. Indeed it looks more like a PR placement for these poorly designed "services".
I had occasion to use Yahoo! Answers. This was the question: "Can you give me a brief description of the Chinese Cultural revolution?"
This was the "best answer -- chosen by voters" --
"A semi illiterate political hack known by the name of MaotseTung decided to bring the rest of the country to his own level. And succeeded by the physical elimination (read- murder) of any and every person whom he considered to be a threat to himself or his self esteem.
By the time he finished some 70 milion died.
Of course if your teacher is a liberal, better not tell him any of the above."
While the quality Q&A sites ultimately depend on the quality of contributions from askers and experts, the systems employed by most sites don't encourage quality. Notable exception would be HelpGlobe.com.
the best site would be either technology reveiw or wiki answers.com'
well its either this site or wiki answers that is a good site to because i answer people questions and theyre are good answers
cornbrain is one that does sell information
This site is unlike those mentioned in that it doesn't sell adspace, cornbrain.com User's actually pay each other to answer questions so their is incentive to answer correctly and expend some little effort into answering questions. I agree that the problem with most question/answer sites is the need for everyone to express their moronic opinion.
I'm wondering if, two years after the initial publication of this research, if the question of what is the best Q&A site shouldn't be revisited? there has been quite a lot of movement in this category even over just the last few days (with Mahalo and even Zappos.com offering new Q&A sites). Our own site, Answerly.com, was launched just this October and I think we would hold our own on a speed to quality ratio against most of the sites in your initial testing.
That being said, some of the challenges you dealt with two years ago are still problems with many of the community based answer forums like Yahoo Answers. I believe people just want a simple way to ask questions and get answers without all the other "stuff" that many other sites offer.
Re: Time to revisit this test?
Agreed, it has been more than two years and the Q&A space has heated up quite a bit.
Our company http://www.webAnswers.com is growing fast and we share advertising revenues with users.
We be more than happy to provide an updated list of popular Q and A sites for your next review.
I found this article searching for similar websites to answers.yahoo.com with similar site search engine: http://similar-site.com/. The article is written more than 2 years ago. Has anything changed since then? Check here for a list of Q&A websites:
http://similar-site.com/s.php?URL=answers.yahoo.com
I loved the article, but I think there are a few that you are missing that have launched since this article was written.
http://qanda.encyclopedia.com
http://www.answerblip.com
Please consider adding this question answer site in your list: W5H Question Answers
This article was from a long time ago. This is significant. Since then much has happened. Answerbag specifically has changed management. There is a lot of Anti-Mormon bigotry and censorship that has taken over at Answerbag.
Pretty much it goes like this. There censors who get points for censoring at Answerbag. They do this in a very arbitrary way. They did tend to give Atheist an incredible amount of slack, while Christians and especially Mormons can be verbally attacked mercilessly.
Answerbag used to a fine Q & A site. But they have been taken over by the Dark Side, and they are now pushing a very dangerous pro-censorship message.
Also they gather use the information that you give them to do illegal privacy invading dirt searches to destroy those that disagree with there Pro-Atheistic point of view.
Censorship is becoming more and more of problem on all Q & A websites. People think that if there is a lot of stupid comments or there is over the top crazy sexual question and answers on these sites than there is no censorship. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Bring up the subject of censorship on the internet itself, and the watch the management of these websites attack you mercilessly.
I am a Mormon. I posted a comment on Answerbag, that was on the subject that I knew something about, namely Mormonism. This comment was removed.
I protested,and wrote that there was nothing pornographic or anything else that was wrong with my comment. There response was that they own the site and they can do anything. That and a lot absolutely hate filled comments from management.
Answerbag has become disgraceful. But so has a lot of Q & A sites, and other social networking sites as well.
It is all very Fahrenheit 451. If someone, anyone, protests against what was written, then management often erases it in knee jerk fashion. Oddly enough sexually explicit comments they just roll over into an adult section (at Answerbag). So in that sense it is also very much like the book Brave New World.
Censorship is happening across the internet, and any discussion about censorship and it's inherit historical connection to Genocide and other results of tyranny (like mass rape) cannot be discussed without the scum bag censors censoring what was written.
Answerbag should be renamed Scumbag. Because that is what they are. They censor Q & A about censorship itself. This is the ultimate evil. And Answerbag earned the title of Scumbag.
I was banned from there website for bringing up the fact that censorship is evil, and it is unconstitutional and it is wrong.
Good luck. And God bless.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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1 Comment
Yedda - a couple more points
Dear Wade Roush,
Thank you for your review. I am glad to see that you were able to find answers to your question on Yedda – "Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?" [http://yedda.com/questions/7353471740164/] and "What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich?" [http://yedda.com/questions/8627840071015/].
I do believe you've missed a couple of features, when compared to other sites:
1. Yedda does not pose any limitations on the number of questions asked. It's not because we didn't get around to implementing a points system. It's because we don't believe in pointless point systems. The way I see it, it doesn't make sense to invite people to ask questions, but then, force them to add 10 "yes I agree" answers to other people questions just to have enough points to ask their question. The way we see it, people should be able to ask as many questions as they need to, to answer because they know the answer, and to vote because they feel an answer deserves a "thumbs up".
2. Yedda does not limit the number of characters in your questions or answers. We don't think you should be forced to fit your question into 100 characters or less. In fact, we invite you to be as detailed as you need to be – because that's what a social knowledge sharing is about – explaining your exact issue and circumstances to the readers of your question, so that they can provide you with the best answer, tailored to your needs.
3. It may seem trivial, but I noticed that you mentioned this in your review of the other services and might have missed it in Yedda – Yedda supports rich, formatted questions and answers, with links, pictures, and embedded video.
4. Yedda provides several widgets that can be added to your blog or web site. Among these widgets – a widget that lets your readers ask you (and the community) a question directly from your blog, a widget that produces an automatic, always-fresh F.A.Q on your blog topics, and a widget that displays your Yedda profile on your blog, so that your readers can see the great answers and thumbs up you've been getting. I invite you to add these widgets to your blog :)
But what's really different about Yedda is the semantic analysis capability and the proactive distribution mechanism.
The semantic analysis employed by Yedda enables us to provide the following services to our users:
1. Automatically suggest topics (tags) to questions based on semantic analysis of the question text. (This was pioneered by Yedda, and Amazon later added a similar service to Askville. I leave it to you to compare the quality of the suggestions in the 2 services).
2. Smart search – when you search for a topic in Yedda, our search is smart enough to find related Q&As automatically, even if they were tagged with a related topic. For example, searching for "fertility" will also return questions tagged with "pregnancy", "ovulation", etc.
3. Finding similar questions – Yedda always provides you with similar – and already answered – questions, whether when you ask your question or later.
4. Generating automatic, always-fresh FAQ –
The proactive distribution mechanism is the one responsible for taping your virtual shoulder at the right time, and drawing your attention to a question in your areas of interest and knowledge. In a sense, it's all about attention optimization. You see, we'd like to think that when you ask a question, you actually really want to get an answer for it. This is the reason why we attach a small monitor to each question, which continues to monitor the question status and your contentment with the answers posted so far. And as long as you still want more / better answers, this component keeps searching for the best people to answer your question and invites them to answer.
I guess that this is the reason why, even though Yedda is still quite young, and does not enjoy the marketing muscles of the big players, the Yedda community was still able to provide you with such great answers – on par and perhaps even exceeding the level of answers in the other services.
BTW, it's funny to note that when you search Google for your questions – "Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?" and "What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich?" – it's the answers on Yedda which appear first. And no, we don't do any SEO. I guess that in a way this also demonstrates the vote of confidence we've been getting from people looking for useful answers from a friendly community of people.
Feel free to contact me by email (my first name at yedda.com) or through the "send message" on my Yedda profile if you have any more questions.
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