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: Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Help Engines | Yahoo: Answers

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

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: 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 [...]

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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: Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Yahoo: Answers