AOL announced that it has acquired Israeli Q&A provider Yedda for an undisclosed sum. Comparable in many respects to Yahoo Answers, Yedda bills itself as a next generation "semantic" Q&A service. AOL will more broadly integrate the functionality into a number of its sites and properties, as Yahoo has with Answers. The release also suggests that search and answers, via Yedda, will be integrated to some degree in the future. [...]

Related Topics: AOL: General | Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Pretty amazing -- Answers.com has issued a press release to warn that its search traffic is down 28 percent due to "a search engine algorithmic adjustment by Google." It raises lots of issues -- how dependent should you be on search traffic; how the "definitions" links that Answers.com has from Google don't seem to generate that much traffic and whether it is really Answers.com that's on the outs with Google, rather than a general change. Press releases or any type of official guidance from companies warning of search traffic losses are fairly rare. I just haven't seen much [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Partnerships | Google: SEO | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | SEO: General

Answers Corp has reached an agreement to buy Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com from Lexico Publishing Group, LLC for $100 million. These properties attracted 11.5 million unique monthly users in the U.S. during the month of June 2007 according to comScore. They generated revenues of $7 million, EBITDA of $2.9 million and net income of $2.8 million in 2006. For more information, see the press release. [...]

Related Topics: Business Issues: Acquisitions & Investments | Channel: Industry | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Last week, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo renewed his campaign from earlier this year against Squidoo as a source of search spam. This time, he appears to have gotten a result. Despite Squidoo's belated plea that it would clean things up, Google seems to have penalized Squidoo. Below, a timeline for those keeping score along with snarky post-game analysis and an explanation of that weird cat photo above. February 2007: Calacanis does a post called "Is Squidoo becoming a massive, dirty SEO back alley?" Squidoo takes a PR hit, but no search impact on the site is reported.   May 20 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Mahalo | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | SEO: Spamming

Googling Google reports Google Russia has launched a Questions & Answers service in Russia. Although Google closed down Google Answers late last year, this launch of Questions & Answers is a new flavor of such an application. To me, it looks more like a Google Groups approach than anything else. Since everything is in Russian, it is hard to understand what exactly is going on. Google Blogoscoped tries to translate the features: - You can ask questions and get answers from other users. - You can earn points for answering questions and become an "expert" in subjects; better answers gain mo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Outside US | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Jason Calacanis has announced Mahalo Greenhouse, a way for users to get paid for writing their own search results for the Mahalo people-powered search engine. The Greenhouse FAQ gives more details on the program, where if accepted, you can earn $10 to $15 per submission. Greenhouse kind of makes Mahalo a bit more like Squidoo. For more details on Mahalo, check out Danny's Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results. Postscript From Danny: Jason comments below on key differences he sees between Greenhouse and Squidoo, which he recently described in an interview with John Battelle as " [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Mahalo | Search Engines: Social Search Engines

ChaCha, which combines traditional algorithmic search with human-assisted search, has announced a video distribution deal with Blinkx. ChaCha's new video search will be entirely powered by Blinkx and potentially incorporated into ChaCha's live search sessions. ChaCha uses chat functionality to enable a staff of paid, expert guides to interact with searchers in real time. This is a big differentiator potentially but the site has struggled in the past to deliver on the promise of assisted search. I've periodically used the site and the guide interaction has improved considerably from launch las [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Video Search Engines

QueryCat is a search engine that is designed to search frequently asked questions, and they claim to have the largest database of these, by using the Alexa web crawler. They have apparently indexed over 2 million questions and answers (though this information isn't on the website) which is a fair number. I tried lots of questions with the service and had very mixed results. 'What does RSS mean?' came back with a good response, but 'How tall is Nelson's column' or 'How many died in the American Civil War?' worked rather less well, and I got much better results by repeating those questions on G [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Other Search Engines

The wisdom of orkut from the Official Google Blog covers how Google's social networking site Orkut now allows people to post polls. No big deal? Perhaps not. But it also makes me wonder if it's a first step toward trying to give Orkut an answer search roll for Google. Yahoo Answers -- where a community provides answers to each other -- continues to gain steam. Yahoo recently added social networking features to Yahoo Answers, and LinkedIn added LinkedIn Answers to its own social networking service back in January. Google had its own Google Answers service, of course. That was a fee-based [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: Orkut | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Yahoo has added a social networking feature to its Answers service, allowing you to add Yahoo Answers users to your own personal collection of contacts, providing direct access to the questions they ask, answer, and star on Answers. "This allows you to identify individuals on Answers whose knowledge you value and make them part of your friend list," said Tomi Poutanen, Yahoo's director of product management for social search. Answers Network is similar to other social networking services offered by Yahoo, including Flickr contacts, the Del.icio.us network and MyBlogLogs contact lists. Adding [...]

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

Impressive. Scanning the latest top web sites rankings from comScore for January 2007 , Wikipedia sites are highlighted for just entering the top ten most visited. OK, technically -- they're in the top ten for having the most unique visitors. In December 2006, Wikipedia sites were ranked 13th of all US web properties, with 39 million unique visitors. In January, comScore says Wikipedia rose to ninth ranked, with 43 million visitors. The top ten, to provide perspective, rounded to the nearest million: Yahoo Sites, 129 million Time Warner Network, 117 million Microsoft Sites, 115 million Goo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Wikipedia | Search Features: General | Stats: comScore | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Popularity

Yesterday Yahoo announced the launch of their new "suggestion boards." Yahoo says that these new boards enable "you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg-style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users." In fact, these have been live for a while, I specifically noticed the SiteExplorer Board at least a few months ago. Techcrunch reports that many from the Digg community are upset with Yahoo over this announcement. The top level Digg message said that Yahoo "ripped off the Digg interface." To be fair, Yahoo did give credit to Dig [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Digg | Yahoo: Message Boards

YouTube and Wikipedia storm to top brand ranking by Reuters reports that Google has secures the top spot in the online branding magazine brandchannel.com survey that asks, "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?". Followed by Google, Apple is second on the brand list. The surprise is that Google's YouTube is ranked number three and number four is the "free encyclopedia," Wikipedia. The survey polled 3,625 branding professionals and students. Postscript: The full list has been published by brandchannel.com. Thanks Gary for letting me know. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: Marketing | Google: YouTube & Video | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Carsten at Search Engine Journal reports that the English Wikipedia has decided to add the nofollow attribute back to the English Wikipedia space. The decision came from the founder, Jimbo Wales, partially, if not completely, based on a discussion of a new SEO contest, where editors are warned of an onslaught spam, from SEOs and this contest. Joost also gets credit for spotting the news early, also explaining that SEOs are the cause for this. Editor, A. B., sums up the reason SEOs are targeting the Wikipedia is "In a nutshell, the goal is to "optimize" (i.e., spam) enough links around the [...]

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

The Internet is awash in data, so much data in fact that one can find numbers on just about any subject. Yet primary research can be very expensive and cumbersome. There are inexpensive polling tools such as Zoomerang or Survey Monkey, which offer a cost-effective way to survey users. But the methodology doesn't produce statistically significant results. Then there are a range of firms that will do online surveys/focus groups. Those can yield results with more statistical "integrity," but they cost more too. Now comes an interesting twist on the "Answers" social media phenomenon: Vizu, a San [...]

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

Dear Wikipedia Editors: I came back from vacation today to discover that in (some of) your infinite crowd wisdom, apparently the page at Wikipedia about Google's Matt Cutts might get deleted. Wow. It's inept things like this that can instantly reduce any respect I have for Wikipedia that builds up over time. Editors, let me tell you a little story, since I've got you here. You know how I tell if I want to trust a travel book about some place, say a Lonely Planet or a Let's Go? I find the edition about a place I know. I'll look up what they're saying about Newport Beach, California, my hom [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Employees | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

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. [...]

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

Led by Amazon's Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions, social search engine ChaCha announced that it had secured a $6 million funding round. ChaCha launched in Q3 last year and employs a network of live guides (college students, stay at home parents, retirees) to help answer user queries in real time in addition to providing traditional algorithmic search. Here's my most recent write up on the engine from November. Given its network of distributed guides, ChaCha is one of the more interesting recent search launches. While it started out quite slowly, the service and functionality have been getting mu [...]

Related Topics: Business Issues: Acquisitions & Investments | Channel: Industry | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines

Gary Price spotted Amazon promoting Askville more aggressively the other day. For example, a search on travel new york city brings up an Askville promotion all the way at the bottom left of the page, it looks like this: Also, Kev at SEOptimise notes that LinkedIn launched an Answers service early this morning. You can see it at http://www.linkedin.com/answers?trk=tab_answers. Yes, this is brand new, because last night I was updating my LinkedIn profile and it was not one of the options. All very timely efforts by Amazon (Askville) and LinkedIn after Google dropped their Answers product, [...]

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

Via Slashdot, What's the Best Q&A Site? from MIT Technology Review tests several question and answer search engine services. They reviewed and ranked AnswerBag, Askville, Live QnA, Wondir, Yahoo Answers and Yedda. So how did they rank? Out of a total 12 points, Yahoo Answers scored 11 points, coming out tops. Here's the rundown: Yahoo Answers (11 points) Live QnA (7 points) Askville (6 points) AnswerBag (4 points) Wondir (4 points) Yedda Answers (4 points) Hitwise posted figures and data to show market share of the different Q&A search engines. Yahoo Answers with 96% Answerbag w [...]

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