Apr 18, 2012 at 4:47pm ET by Matt McGee

Yahoo's product teams are officially on notice. Shortly after announcing Q1 earnings yesterday, new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson dropped a bomb during the analysts' call when he said the company will be "shutting down or transitioning roughly 50 properties that don't contribute meaningfully to engagement or revenue." He went on to say that Yahoo's focus will be on its "core media connections and commerce businesses," such as Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Mail and a few other successful Yahoo properties. But what about the 50 properties that are destined to be shut down or transitioned [...]

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 [...]

Facebook: No Plans To Give Search Engines Access To Facebook Questions

Jul 29, 2010 at 5:21pm ET by Matt McGee

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 [...]

Yahoo Answers Gets Major Search Upgrades, Email Alerts

Jul 16, 2010 at 2:03pm ET by Matt McGee

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 [...]

Will Quora Challenge Google? No. Is It Useful? Yes

Jun 22, 2010 at 10:44am ET by Greg Sterling

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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