Against what could be considered great odds, Yahoo Answers has reached a pretty stunning milestone: 300 million questions have been asked since the service launched in 2005. But despite that figure, activity on Yahoo Answers is on the decline. The company's announcement today includes these additional statistics: On average, 2 questions are being asked and 6 answered per second. So this means there’s an astonishing 7,000 questions and an incredible 21,000 answers per hour. That's a total of 28,000 questions and answers being posted every hour. But about two years ago, when Y [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Top News | Yahoo: Answers

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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | SEM Industry: Acquisitions

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 [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Yandex | Wolfram Alpha | Yahoo: Search

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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Wolfram Alpha

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: Channel: Consumer | Quora | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | Yahoo: Answers

Even though its traffic is down, Hunch says new user registrations have risen dramatically recently. And as more users register, Hunch says its recommendation engine keeps getting smarter. Barely more than two months ago, Hunch began requiring visitors to register/login to use the site. In doing so, all Hunch visitors were required to answer the site's "Teach Hunch About You" (THAY) questions -- the information that Hunch relies on to make more accurate recommendations. To date, Hunch says its users have answered more than 50 million THAY questions. At the time of that June announcement, Hu [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | Search Engines: Hunch

The days of search engines merely being a middle man are over. Search isn't about sending users to the right web page, it's about getting them the information they want as soon as possible -- sometimes it's a web page, but it might also be a sports score, movie showtimes, election information, or some other piece of information. The latter -- factual pieces of information -- is where Swingly comes in. The site, which has been tested by a couple hundred beta users so far, is now going into its public beta phase and invites are being shared more liberally. (In fact, we have some to gi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | Top News

Hunch has announced what it calls a "streamlined and simplified" home page, but the changes really reflect a slight change in focus, too. When the site launched last year, we referred to Hunch as a "personal decision maker;" Hunch itself used the term "decision engine." The new home page, though, presents a change of emphasis; logged-in users are immediately presented with a group of recommendations. The previous home page was more of an activity stream that seemed geared toward funneling users into existing decision topics. The difference between decision-making and recommending [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | Search Engines: Hunch | Search Engines: Personalized Search Engines

Launched last week, Facebook Questions has a great opportunity to become the most popular question-and-answer destination on the web. With a built-in audience of 500 million users worldwide, Facebook could surpass Yahoo Answers and its 200+ million users in relatively quick order. But for all of its interesting features (see my article, Up Close With Facebook Questions, for details), there's a spanner in the works that could doom Facebook Questions to failure. In a word: search. Simply put, Facebook Questions doesn't have a traditional keyword-based search tool that people can use [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Features: Analysis | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | Top News

That's one of the big questions people are asking after yesterday's launch of Facebook Questions. While many have assumed the answer would be "yes," a Facebook spokesperson tells us that assumption is wrong. Currently, search engines cannot access questions and answers through our Questions product. That may be something we consider for the future but have no current plans to allow it. Facebook is blocking search engines by only showing Questions to logged-in users. Sure enough, a site:facebook.com/questions/ search on Google shows only a handful of results, none of which are actuall [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Facebook | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | SEO: Blocking Spiders | Top News | Yahoo: Answers

Facebook Questions is the latest in a long line of question-and-answer services online but, as Danny Sullivan mentioned in his news article earlier, it's the only one with a community of 500 million users behind it. For comparison's sake, Yahoo Answers, the recognized leader in the Q&A space, announced in late 2009 that it had reached 200 million users worldwide. It remains to be seen what percentage of Facebook members will use Questions, but it's obvious that the service could surpass Yahoo Answers in due time. Facebook Questions will likely succeed by default to some degree thanks to hav [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | Top News

Long expected, Facebook's new Facebook Questions service is now being offered. It allows Facebook users to specifically ask question to and get answers from others in Facebook's now 500 million strong community. The service just went live at 1pm Pacific Time today, and we're working on a detailed look at all the features (this is now live, see Up Close With Facebook Questions). That will be posted shortly and linked to from this article. Facebook has a short blog post about the service now, highlighting: All questions are made public to anyone, not just to your friends Questions [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Features: General | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines

Wolfram|Alpha, the fact engine has released a neat new feature today. Wolfram|Alpha is allowing anyone to build query driven widgets that can be embedded on any web page. The purpose is to enable publishers, bloggers, professors, teachers and so on to easily build quick widgets to add to their content and materials. You can build widgets based off of Wolfram|Alpha's large database of scientific information and data. Widget creation is all based off the initial query, which then can be made into a simple form that can be used by anyone. I'll explain this in more detail below. First, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Wolfram Alpha

As we (and others) hinted a couple weeks ago, Ask.com is re-launching as a cross between a traditional search engine and the question-and-answer service that it was back in the site's heyday. NOTE: SEE OUR FOLLOW-UP PIECE, Ask Comes Full Circle With "Q&A" Offering The new Ask.com homepage represents a pretty dramatic change. Search is still front and center, but in order to focus on the Q&A aspect, Ask says all users will now see the "Question of the Day" feature; a section of "Popular Questions" is also featured prominently on the home page. The look-and-feel changes are [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Yahoo Answers, the number one Answers/Q&A search engine on the web, has announced a series of improvements to the search experience on the site. The new search options are a welcome addition to what was long one of the site's Achilles heels. Here's an overview of some the new tools: Search results can now be sorted by relevance, time (newest/oldest), and number of answers (most/least). These sorting options have been available when browsing categories, but I believe they're new to Yahoo Answers' search results pages. The sorting options appear at the top of the search results. On [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Top News | Yahoo: Answers

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an article in conjunction with Quora's public beta launch. The article framed the discussion as Quora (and its kin) vs. Google: The race to build a successor to Web search is heating up as a number of young companies seek to fill gaps they see with Google Inc. One of the hopefuls, Quora Inc., made its public launch Monday after months of private testing. The Palo Alto, Calif., company, co-founded by two early Facebook Inc. engineers, wants to collect and organize information people have in their heads but that may not be available online, such as [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Facebook | Google: Web Search | Quora | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Twitter | Yahoo: Answers

Many marketers understand Twitter search is a powerful way to monitor brand mentions and reach out to customers. But I think few realize what a powerful platform it provides to reach out on non-branded generic mentions. To better illustrate this, let me introduce the "Anyone Know" Twitter search. Actually, I'll explain "Anyone Know" toward the end of this article. To provide the right context for it, I first need to cover the brand monitoring that's already so well known. Brand Monitoring On Twitter Comcast is the classic brand monitoring story, covered over and over again. Comcast wa [...]

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Yahoo Answers -- by far the largest answer search engine on the web -- says it passed the one billion answer mark within the past week. In today's announcement, Yahoo has also shared several other interesting stats about the Q&A service: Yahoo! Answers currently receives: 823,966 questions and answers per day... that works out to 34,331 per hour or 572 per minute which is 10 questions and answers posted EVERY second! Last December, Yahoo announced that Answers has more than 200 million users around the world, with 350,000 new visitors per day. Of note: Today's post says Ya [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Yahoo: Answers

Answers.com has a strong URL (if not a brand) and lots of traffic, more than 25 million monthly unique users. It was the source of definitions in the "definitions" link in the upper right of Google SERPs. The key word in that last sentence is "was." As of yesterday, without fanfare, Google replaced Answers.com with its own dictionary. This will be an interesting test of Answers.com's strength and resilience. It will undoubtedly loose considerable traffic (how much is the question). And because it's ad supported that will mean a corresponding loss of ad revenue. Furthermore Answers.com i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: General | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Top News