It might be called an “anti-search engine” because, like Blekko’s Rich Skrenta, FindTheBest’s O’Conner believes that search results have become cluttered and filled with spam. O’Conner wanted to provide structured, “apples-to-apples comparisons” of places, institutions and products with total transparency.

The site aggregates and then provides structured comparison data across a growing range of categories, including Arts and Entertainment, Education, Health, Science, Technology (and tech products), Sports, Recreation and others.

FindTheBest has been upgrading its UI and functionality and today is considerably more usable than when it launched. It’s getting better and better.

This morning it introduced “Top 10 slideshows” and “buyers guides.” There’s a “consumer reports”-like angle here except that the content are from a range of third party sources and it’s all free.

Here’s an example of a new buyer’s guide for AT&T smartphones:

FindTheBest makes the point that these buyers guides are not generic but highly specific (e.g., California Colleges, Ski Resorts in France). Here’s an example of one of the Top 10 slideshows for laptops (which can be embedded):

Find the Best Laptops and Netbooks

The ultimate ambition of the site is to become “a trusted source for consumers to find reliable information free from hidden marketing schemes.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Entries

DoubleClick Founder Launches Structured “Decision Engine” FindTheBest.com

“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. Rosenschein continued, “This agreement is also a positive for our community members. The integrity and commitment of our company to our products remain unchanged, as we continue our mission of creating the ultimate destination for answers.”

Personally, I wanted to wish a huge congratulations to the Answers.com team!

For the full press release click here.

Postscript: BusinessInsider reports Answers.com shareholders are going to try to prevent the deal from happening.

A source close to Outboard investments, which owns 9.2% of the company, told us, “There’s not a shot in the world this thing is going through. This is going up for auction or it’s not going down.”

Says a principle: “We got this news this morning with our cornflakes – on Yahoo. The company gave no indication that it was anywhere near making a deal with anybody or that it was even shopping it around.”

“We’re not agreeing to anything at this stage. We’re waiting for the fourth quarter outcome. All we’ve seen is less than bare bones. Our expectation is that on reflection, the board will reconsider and look for signifinantly higher price.”

Related Stories:

• Answers.com Loses “Pole Position” To Google Dictionary
• Answers.com To Buy Dictionary.com For $100 Million
• Answers.com Loses Significant Google Traffic Despite Google Definition Links
• Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”

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 says this billionth question was just one of several milestones the company has reached recently:

• Traffic is at three million questions per day
• Overall user base — online and mobile — is 25 million
• 62,000 guides are answering questions
• The ChaCha.com website had a record of nearly one million unique visitors on a single day
• It set another record with two million questions asked via mobile/SMS in a single day

ChaCha’s announcement says all this has happened in the space of two years, so I presume the company is using its January 2008 launch as a mobile text answering service as the start date (which would actually be closer to three years ago than two), not its September 2006 debut as a human-assisted search engine.

You may be wondering how ChaCha’s milestones compare to other Q&A engines, namely Yahoo Answers. It’s not really a fair comparison, but if you want to know, Yahoo Answers announced that it had reached a billion questions back in October 2009, a little more than four years after its launch. And then last December, Yahoo announced that Answers had hit 200 million visitors worldwide.

I say the comparison isn’t fair because ChaCha and Yahoo Answers are largely trying to be different things to different users. Where Yahoo Answers has grown as a desktop-based site, ChaCha is much more geared toward mobile usage and the type of questions that go along with it. Yahoo Answers users generally don’t use the site to ask questions about local phone numbers, for example, but those questions can be quite common on ChaCha. It might be an overstatement to say ChaCha and Yahoo Answers are apples and oranges, but they definitely have very different user bases and use cases.

It also developed one of the broadest and most effective marketing platforms (SMS-based) to reach youth and young adults. ChaCha last year integrated with Facebook and started a social network of sorts (ChaCha.me). The site added local deals and coupons. Now the company has relaunched its main site ChaCha.com with new content and functionality.

The new ChaCha.com, which uses HTML5, is more social and offers images and video relevant to queries/questions. There are also new topic pages for browsing. And there are fewer ads (for more share of voice) and greater contextual relevance. There’s also an emphasis on brand advertising. As on Yahoo Answers, users can rate or vote on the best answer to a question.

Whether you use or like ChaCha, what’s impressive about the company is its resilience and persistence, and willingness to creatively try things as it reacts to twists and turns in the economy and the market.

Other Q&A or social search services include (partial list):

• Aardvark
• Answers.com
• Answerbag
• Ask Q&A
• Askville/Amazon
• MerchantCircle Answers
• Facebook Questions
• Hunch
• kgb
• JustAnswer
• LinkedIn Answers
• Quora
• Yahoo Answers

And at least a dozen more.

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, Hunch said that users with profiles typically get 20% to 40% better results.

In today’s blog post, Hunch shares some of the results of that change:

Since we changed Hunch to login only, our overall site traffic has dropped but the number of users registering daily has tripled to about 3,000 per day, growing aggregate accounts by about 15% every month. The accuracy of recommendations has gotten a lot better since Hunch is much smarter when users have an account.

Hunch also says it will soon announce “a number of partnership deals” that will involve Hunch being used to personalize other web sites.

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 give away at the end of this article.)

What Is Swingly?

It’s an answer engine, but not like Yahoo Answers, which too often is an opinion engine and more like a message board or forum. Swingly is a fact engine, but with a different slant than Wolfram|Alpha. There’s also a bit of Wikipedia in the mix here, but with Swingly you can avoid reading those sometimes ultra-long articles to find that one fact you need. Swingly is machine-based and uses semantic text extraction to build its question-and-answer pairs, so it’s different from ChaCha’s human-powered service.

If anything, Swingly is probably closest to what Ask.com was and wants to be again — an enormous repository of searchable questions and answers. Last month, Ask.com said that it has 500 million Q&A “pairs;” in a call last week, Swingly CEO Andy Hickl told me that he has more than 100 billion pairs indexed from across the web.

“We want to demonstrate that there’s a role for machines in social Q&A,” Hickl says. “The answers are out there. We want to index them.”

How Swingly Works

Swingly has been crawling the web, adding semantic information to the text it finds to piece together facts and the questions those facts answer. (It’s been crawling the competition, too, as some of the screenshots below show.) It performs well, Hickl says, when you approach Swingly like a buddy. “We do best when you ask well-formed, natural language questions, like you’d ask a friend. You wouldn’t talk to a friend with a bunch of keywords.”

For some questions, Swingly not only provides a list of matching answers/facts, but also fills the right-side column with additional information about the subject of your search. For other questions, Swingly is showing ads in the right from Google’s AdSense program. Hickl says Swingly may also monetize with paid answers to complement the organic results from its database.

While Swingly is heavily machine-driven, there are human elements at play, too. Users can provide feedback via a few small links next to each search result:

• Edit – users can submit additional questions that are answered by the facts Swingly displays
• Like – lets users indicate good answers
• Report – lets users flag answers

(If Swingly grows too quickly, the amount of user-generated feedback/content could become a problem. Hickl says the site currently has only 2.5 full-time employees.)

Swingly’s Strengths & Weaknesses

Swingly performs best when you search for facts — like Who, What, and When. It seems to do okay with some Where questions, but not with others. (More on that below.) You wouldn’t ask Swingly for opinion-based questions, like “What’s the best steakhouse in Seattle?” But, a question like “What was the first video on MTV?” is right up Swingly’s alley.

You also shouldn’t expect Swingly to answer “Why” questions — these require an interpretation of the facts. A question similar to the above, “Why are The Buggles important in music history?” doesn’t have any results.

Swingly does well with specific date-related questions, like “When did Safeco Field open?” This is a great answer, exactly what you’d be looking for:

But “Where” questions can be hit-and-miss. The ambiguity of language means that Swingly struggles if you ask something that has multiple correct answers, like “Where do the Seattle Mariners play?”

All of those answers are correct; they do play “in” the American League, and they do play spring training games in Peoria, Arizona. But the user is probably looking for the fourth answer down, Safeco Field. On the other hand, ask “Where is U2 from?” and Swingly nails it.

Just as human-powered Q&A engines are only as good/smart as the people answering questions, Swingly and other machine-powered fact engines are only as good as the web pages they crawl. And, in some cases, the facts on web pages might be wrong or outdated.

Swingly says the Yankees have won 26 World Series, and cites multiple web pages for that answer. But MLB.com says they’ve won 27 World Series, the most recent one happening last fall.

And, for what it’s worth, WikiAnswers also got it correct.

Final Thoughts

Despite the number of Q&A sites already available, I think there’s room for Swingly to carve out some space for itself in this field. It has room to improve, but is already pretty well-developed for an unfinished product.

If you’d like to try it out, sign up for the public beta at beta.swingly.com. You’ll be asked to create an account with your Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or OpenID account. We’re told that, if you enter

SearchEngineLand

as your invite code, you’ll be fast-tracked to get an invite. And yes, it’s case-sensitive and should be typed exactly as shown above.

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 is admittedly slight, but it’s a change nonetheless. Recommendations on Hunch were previously something that users typically accessed only after going through a decision-making, question-and-answer process.

On a fact sheet updated in May, Hunch said it has more than 6,000 topics and 75,000+ possible recommendation outcomes. From that collective knowledge, Hunch has been publishing some interesting reports on its blog, like this one about summer vacation preferences, and a more recent report on food preferences.

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 to find questions that interest them. And without that, the discovery of questions is much more difficult than it should be; possibly difficult enough that many Facebook users will eventually give up on the service.

Facebook Questions & Search

Let’s take a look at the existing search options on Facebook Questions.

1. Facebook Questions “home” page: www.facebook.com/?sk=questions

On the home page (for lack of a better term), there’s a search box in the upper right that asks, What do you want to know?

For many users, the natural inclination will be to type in a keyword here, like “iPhone” or “justin bieber” or “oakland raiders.” They’re looking for questions about those topics. We’re all familiar with typing keywords into a search box, and this has all the appearances of being one.

But it’s not a search box. “Questions only, not topic searches,” a Facebook spokesperson tells us. It’s a “questions box” and, as I showed last week, it doesn’t respond to anything less than three words:

But, if you begin to type a question, after you hit your third word, this box will show you questions that mirror/match what you’ve begun to ask.

There’s a related problem here: If you continue typing more than three words, and Facebook can’t find any matches, the dropdown suggestions go away and you’re left with your question sitting in the box.

Your inclination will be to hit “Return” to search Facebook for a similar question, but — since this isn’t a search box — hitting “Return” actually creates a new question. Ack!

There’s no confirmation to ask if you really intended to ask a new question, which is a shame because I’d be willing to bet many users think they’re searching Facebook Questions, not adding a new question to the site.

Worse, over to the right of my new question, one of the related questions is practically the same question, but Facebook didn’t show it to me on the dropdown when I originally typed my question.

(This auto-creation of new questions and poor matching of previously asked questions will throw some doubt on any stats that Facebook reveals showing how many questions have been asked on the service.)

2. Search from a Question page

You’ll notice (two screenshots above) that there’s another search box above my unintentional dogs vs. cats question — let’s just call it a text field to be safe. Since Facebook auto-tagged my question in the “dogs” topic, the text field indicates that that’s the topic I’m in — notice the “Questions about” to the left in the screenshot above.

I can click the “Next Question” button to see another question in the Dogs topic. Or, I can type something else in the text field. If I type “iPhone,” a dropdown shows me that there are two existing topics about the iPhone.

The first one looks good: 73 questions. I want to go see those questions and maybe answer some of them, or see if some of them match the question I want to ask. But, when I choose that from the dropdown, Facebook still doesn’t show me a page of search results matching “iPhone.”

I expect to see a list of maybe 10 or 20 of those 73 questions, but Facebook instead shows me one question. There’s no indication why this question was chosen to represent the entire iPhone topic and, in this case, it’s a question that seems to be as much about using Facebook as about using an iPhone.

In this case, as in the first case above, it’s not just a bad search experience on Facebook Questions; it’s not a search experience at all.

Final Thoughts

Facebook Questions seems to have focused very heavily on making it as easy as possible to ask a question. You can do that from your profile Wall. You can ask questions about your friends from their profiles. You can also ask questions — intentionally or not — via the search question box atop the Questions “home” page.

But finding questions is a different story. There’s no traditional keyword-based search anywhere in the product. “You cannot search for keywords, only topics,” Facebook tells us. But even when you do search for a topic, you don’t get a list of search results — you get a single question.

In email conversations last week, Facebook spokespersons made sure to point out that this is still a beta product. True enough, and no doubt Facebook Questions will evolve through additional use and testing.

But if an improved search option — and almost any search option would be an improvement — isn’t part of the product’s evolution, Facebook Questions may be doomed to a quick demise, 500 million users or not.

Postscript, August 4: Marty and crew at aimClear pointed out that Facebook Questions are now appearing as potential matches when you use the main Facebook search box at the top of every page, and there’s a lot of clutter involved:

FindTheBest is a kind of comparison engine for structured data of all sorts. It’s not an alternative to search per se. In fact it will rely heavily on search and SEO for user discovery. The idea is to provide consumers with an objective way to compare all sorts of information across a range of categories, from colleges to fast food.

Here’s what founder O’Conner said about what motivated him to create the site:

FindTheBest.com was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way. While the web is great at making seemingly infinite amounts of information accessible, the Internet can be a little overwhelming in that it doesn’t allow for straight up apples-to-apples comparisons, nor is it transparent enough to allow you to spot those hidden marketing schemes influencing the data you receive.

Here are the current categories that FindTheBest offers comparison data for:

• Arts and Entertainment
• Business and Economy
• Education
• Health
• Reference
• Science
• Society
• Sports and Recreation
• Technology

The metaphor, as the video below suggests, is travel meta search (e.g., Kayak).

After a user does a search or picks a category of interest, she’s presented with a semi-wonky spreadsheet-like display of factual information. Here’s an example comparison for the nutritional information of McDonald’s burgers:

A menu, so to speak, on the left allows users to filter and refine the comparisons — in this case by type of food item, as well as by calories, fat, cholesterol and so on — just as with product or travel search sites. These topic-specific data sets are called “comparison apps” by O’Connor.

O’Connor told us that the data come from a broad range of sources, including government databases, private sources the site’s own researchers and, eventually, users. FindTheBest uses a mix of machines and humans to clean and present the data in a more structured and “consumable way,” with automation being the objective, if possible.

Here’s another comparison of the most recent World Cup champions:

Right now FindTheBest offers 336 “comparison apps” in nine categories. These include 31,372,000 listings and 881,837,794 data points, according to the site.

Even with all that information, if it hopes to become a destination, FindTheBest will need to further broaden coverage. However O’Conner says the site won’t get into products or travel, two areas that inspired FindTheBest and that he believes are relatively well  handled online today.

As you drill deeper into the site you discover lots of rich factual information, much of which is very search/SEO friendly. Here’s a profile-level page for the top grossing film Avatar, for example:

Another search-friendly feature, somewhat buried in the site, is Questions. Q&A is a hot area right now (Ask, Facebook, etc.) and FindTheBest has its own version of that, though it seems mostly intended to attract SEO traffic rather than engage users.

Many if not every fact on the site has an alternative presentation in Q&A form:

Beyond SEO, as a discovery mechanism, any of the comparison modules can be embedded on third party sites or blogs and there are also embeddable category widgets that FindTheBest hopes will spread the word.

While incomplete and rough around the edges at this early stage FindTheBest offers structured factual comparisons, to help support consumer decision-making, that one cannot do right now on search engines. In this way, FindTheBest struck me as something like the more talented offspring of Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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 actually Q&A from the first 24 hours that the beta has been open.

The same search produces zero results on both Yahoo and Bing.

Facebook’s move is unusual. As far back as 2007, the company was starting to open up some content to search engines — a trend that’s continued more recently with various agreements to let search engines access certain user content. For years, Yahoo Answers has been a pretty formidable rankings powerhouse, and no doubt gets a substantial amount of traffic via search engines.

It’s odd that Facebook would want to ignore that traffic source entirely. Don’t be surprised if this policy changes.

Postscript, July 30: Experian Hitwise has responded to my claim near the end of this article about how much traffic Yahoo Answers gets via search engines. In a tweet this morning, Hitwise reports that “62% of upstream visits to Yahoo Answers came via Google last week.”