Feb 3, 2011 at 12:19pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The popular questions and answers site, Answers.com has announced they have been acquired by AFCV Holdings, LLC. for $127 million. AFCV Holdings is paying $10.50 per share for the outstanding shares. "This is a great outcome for our shareholders," said Bob Rosenschein, Founder, Chairman and CEO. "After an exciting six years as a public company, we are very pleased to achieve considerable value for our investors. The acquisition price of $10.50 per share represents a significant cash premium of approximately 33% over our 90-day volume-weighted average closing stock price." Mr. Rosenschei [...]

If Google Played Jeopardy: Smartest Search Engine, But It’s No Ken Jennings

Jan 26, 2011 at 6:40pm ET by Matt McGee

Google: Go to the head of the class. Wikipedia: You stay after school for extra tutoring. That seems to be one of the conclusions you can draw from a fun blog post today by Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram. Writing about the Jeopardy battle between past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and IBM's Watson computer (the computer won a dry run earlier this month), Wolfram decided to see how several search engines would fare when asked to answer Jeopardy clues. The results? Google scored highest in both having the answer show up anywhere on the first page of search results and ha [...]

Wolfram Alpha Redesigns For 2011

Jan 12, 2011 at 2:40pm ET by Matt McGee

Next time you visit Wolfram Alpha, you'll be greeted by a shiny, new, colorful home page -- that's just one of a few design tweaks the site has announced on its blog. There are also some interesting tweaks to the results pages. One is the addition of linked data inside the search results, which you can see on this screenshot. I did a search for "space needle," and in the data that Wolfram Alpha returns, the words "Seattle," "Washington," and "United States" are all links that run searches on each term. The data sets also now have dog-ear reveals that can be used to get access to [...]

Quora Co-Founder Outlines Plans To Deal With Growing Pains

Jan 7, 2011 at 3:16pm ET by Matt McGee

Quora, a relatively new question-and-answer search engine that's become a darling of the tech community, is suffering through growing pains caused by exponential growth in the past two weeks. And co-founder Charlie Cheever has outlined some of the company's plans to deal with those growing pains. In a post today on Quora, Cheever admits that it's been "a big challenge" to maintain Quora's character while the site has been flooded with new users. How much growth has the site seen? Quora engineer Albert Sheu shared a chart showing two recent spikes -- one right after Christmas and another rig [...]

Related Topics: Quora | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

ChaCha Answers Its Billionth Question, Hits Other Milestones

Dec 7, 2010 at 8:14am ET by Matt McGee

ChaCha has announced that its Q&A engine has reached several milestones -- the most notable perhaps being that the Q&A engine answered its billionth question. The question, which I believe can be seen here, was asked on Saturday by a 14-year-old Minnesota boy, and answered by Kenny and Spencer, two ChaCha guides: Q: How do you say friend in Elvish according to the Lord of the Rings? A: Mellon is the Elvish word for 'friend' in 'Lord of the Rings. ChaCha! Ironically, the guide cites this question/answer on WikiAnswers -- a ChaCha competitor -- as the source of his reply. ChaCha s [...]

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