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Jan. 8, 2007 at 2:18pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan
LinkedIn Answers Launched
Now joining the questions answering game is LinkedIn, with its new LinkedIn Answers service, just two days old. Jason Calacanis pinged me about it just via instant message, saying he loves it. Sequoia Capital is an investor in LinkedIn -- and Jason now works for Sequoia -- so you can easily assume some interest in giving me a heads-up. But then again, I don't disbelieve him saying he loves it.
Jason pointed over to Who's are the top 10 web designer in the world today? that he posted a day ago and says he got great answers. I couldn't judge, since I don't know who the top 10 web designers are. But I liked his response to why this might be better than Yahoo Answers:
This is better because folks in here are connected and care about how they answer the questions. Answering questions here gets you a job or a client.
I or someone else from Search Engine Land might spin around to take a longer look at the service in the future. In the meantime, Question & Answer Search Engines Ranked covers a recent review of other question answering services, including powerhouse Yahoo Answers.
Postscript: Oops! I missed Barry mentioning this earlier while I was gone.
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After my initial browse - the Q & A section looks good, I'm putting it on my list of things to try out / manipulate / enjoy. Thanks for the news.
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Awesome! I also tried several Q&A services to get a high level definition of "sentiment analysis" over the past weeks, including LinkedIn. Answer services are sort of a hybrid between algo search and human-run directories with a different user interaction model where you can ask plain English questions and get plain English answers. What I really like is that answers come from people, somewhat along the path of Wikipedia, although the set of info retrieved is made of more diverse answers rather than one by consensus. it seems that answering services do better for sophisticated queries in the form of plain English questions than do 2.1 keywords typed in a traditional search box. Most volunteering to answer questions do care (or is it the miles?), include subjective in nature opinions and often provide "tone" clues turning Answers databases into wonderful data sets to mine, extract and make sense of "sentiments".
Overall, LinkedIn did pretty well ... by a long shot. Makes sense, my network is made up of people that i) care about Sentiment Analysis ... if anybody does, and ii) care about me, ... not, or to some extent ... say, just a tinny bit more than a total stranger. Answers are as good as the people you ask the questions from, right? Well, LinkedIn is all about people you know and just released an Answer service with a really nice, intuitive, minimalist and simple Answers results page.
-arnaud