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.

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.”

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 the left side of the search results are several new search refinement options. There are several additional filtering options under the “Number of Answers” and “Date Submitted” dropdowns.

This allows for very detailed targeting; you could, for example, search for questions about “sunburn” that were posted in the last 90 days and had 25 answers or more. (Think: blog post topic ideas.)

The new refinments are carried over to the Advanced Search page, which also has more specific keyword-targeting capabilities and support Boolean search commands (AND, ANDNOT, OR).

And right at the bottom of that screenshot, you can see options that allow you to save searches and even get a daily email with new questions that match your saved searches. That could be a welcome tool for marketers and/or business owners who use Yahoo Answers to monitor questions surrounding certain keywords. Be sure to read the Yahoo Answers blog post for more detail about how the email monitoring works, as well as the other search changes they’ve announced.

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 background on the inner workings of a company and advice on how to get a reservation at an exclusive restaurant.

Think of Quora as “Aardvark meets LinkedIn Q&A meets Twitter.” It offers people the ability to post questions and to answer them, effectively conducting “discussions” of topics online. It also has followers and so links people together as individuals and as groups of interest.

The site is very nicely packaged and put together.

Quora joins a longish line of sites that have been categorized under various rubrics: “social search,” “answer engines,” “help engines” “social directory assistance” and “answer communities.” Yahoo Answers is the patriarch of the group. But there are a whole bunch of others. Here’s a partial list:

• Amazon’s Askville
• LinkedIn (Q&A)
• Answers.com
• Mosio
• Aardvark (now part of Google)
• kgb
• ChaCha
• MerchantCircle Q&A

Microsoft offered Q&A for a time but it was shuttered. Facebook is developing a Q&A service and Twitter is informally used in this way. Bing Social offers a version of this. And we might throw Hunch into this bunch.

And a long time ago Google offered “answers,” which was a paid service. It was shut down in 2006 as the free Yahoo Answers service was gaining adoption.

None of these sites are “Google killers.” In fact they make Google stronger because the questions and answers often will be indexed — extending Google’s reach into the “tail.” Quora has plans to allow Google to index its questions and answers.

There are numerous circumstances where someone would potentially go to one of these Q&A services to get information before coming to Google or in tandem with Google to get additional perspective. It’s clear that in many instances a human will have a better “answer” or recommendation than Google. But now Google owns one of these sites too — Vark.

If Quora hits “critical mass” then it could become a very effective place to get information or perspective on various issues. LinkedIn’s Q&A service is well used and often very effective. And a Facebook Q&A service could prove to be extremely popular.

An interesting question to ponder is how Google will ultimately deploy the assets it acquired with Aardvark.com. It could simply operate and grow the service as it is today or it could also use it in some new and creative ways as well — for example as a customer service tool or as a concierge service. Mobile is a particularly interesting use case.

Regardless, human Q&A and search will co-exist; it’s not “or,” it’s “and.”

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 Yahoo answers is “available in 9 languages across 21 countries.” But back in October, a Yahoo blog post said the service was “available in 26 markets and 12 languages.” I’m trying to find out which three languages and five countries/markets no longer have a localized Yahoo Answers.

Postscript: Yahoo explains that the difference in countries/languages is because there are five markets with three languages in Asia that are on a different platform and not included in the count used in the most recent blog post.

The primary functional changes involve a new set of navigation tabs and a new way of browsing the categories on Yahoo Answers.

The four new tabs will appear across the site, and hovering over the Browse Categories tab will show a dropdown layer that replaces the old laundry list of categories from the left margin of Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo has also changed the general look and feel of the site, and made backend upgrades, as well.

Hitwise has previously said that Yahoo Answers is the number two reference site online, behind Wikipedia. According to Yahoo’s own stats, Answers has:

• 200 million visitors worldwide
• more than one billion questions and answers
• about 15 million users visiting the site each day
• about 350,000 new visitors per day

About a year ago, Hitwise showed that Answers was one of Yahoo’s top 10 properties.

Gigaom reached out to comScore to see what exactly Yahoo is number one at and that includes:

• News
• Finance
• Sports
• Mail
• Entertainment
• Games (near tie)

Yahoo Answers is not mentioned here, but I believe they dominate that category, as well.

We don’t often discuss Yahoo’s other properties, but it is important to note that although Yahoo is a distant second to Google in search, Yahoo does dominate the web in so many other ways.

Mahalo Answers is the newest entry into the crowded Q&A reference site space, but it offers a twist that its biggest competitors don’t: the chance to earn money by contributing to the service. Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis says the new service is the third and final piece of his original vision for Mahalo, making it a site that combines search, content, and knowledge exchanges.

Yahoo Answers is the 800-lb. gorilla in this field, with some astonishing numbers reported earlier this year: 135 million users and 500 million answers worldwide, and growing at a rate of 11 million new answers per month just in the U.S.

What Calacanis hopes will set Mahalo apart is cash. Users asking a question can offer money as an incentive to attract good answers, and after the fact, other readers can also tip the best answer(er).

Mahalo Answers also brings money into the Q&A equation by giving experts the opportunity to charge money for direct questions. An SEO expert, for example, could set up shop in Mahalo Answers and charge a small sum to anyone who wants to ask a direct question.

Money was part of the now-defunct Google Answers ecosystem, which functioned very similarly to what Mahalo is doing now. The primary differences are that Google Answers required a cash payment, while it’s optional on Mahalo, and questions on Google Answers were asked to pre-screened experts, while anyone on Mahalo can answer a question.

Yahoo Answers also has an open approach with any community member being able to answer questions. But in his blog post about today’s launch, Calacanis takes a swipe at Yahoo Answers’ free-for-all approach:

“…the chance of making some money in Mahalo Answers is obviously a lot better than the guarantee of making none in Yahoo! Answers–not that I’m comparing the two products.”

But everyone else is, as evidenced by the discussion on Techmeme.

It’s the fourth session of the second day of SMX Social Media and it’s all about Wikipedia.

Web users rely on community-contributed-content sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. These sites enable you to communicate directly with an engaged audience. But contribute to the conversation with care. Too much spin and your credibility will be shot and your brand damaged. You’ll come away from this session knowing how these influential sites work and how to participate constructively.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers: Lise Broer “Durova”, Administrator, Wikipedia Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Matt McGee!!!!!!!!!! is up first and he says that people can use it for their expertise and knowledge for businesses, not so much for people who are providing widgets and the like.

What is Yahoo Answers? A simple Q&A site that is incredibly busy. There is a constant stream of questions and answers.

Like any social media site, you can create a profile with a link to your website (nofollow, sadly). Therefore, it’s for traffic building, not for link building. It is the #2 reference site behind Wikipedia.

They know that people are using it to market their business. In fact, they encourage that to build credibility and to create a positive brand image compared to other types of social media.

It is also okay to drop links, as long as you’re providing a helpful answer to someone’s question. If you’re a good member of the community, go for it.

Yahoo Answers gives him a huge jump of referral traffic: highest source of new visitors and the lowest bounce rate. Shocking!

Also, it gives a great amount of search traffic. It does not come close to Wikipedia but it still gives good traffic.

How to use them: - The interface is easy to use, and there are a lot of categories so it’s inundating to browse. They have RSS feeds for every category on the site and every subcategory. - Sort wisely. View by date or view by number of answers. Matt says that it’s better to sort by date. He then finds questions that are about to expire so that he can provide a more meaningful answer in order to get points. If you sort by the number of answers or by the most answers, those are answers that get a lot of traffic. It helps to get eyeball exposure rather than point exposure. - Sign your name when leaving a question or answer – why? Spammers don’t leave their names, so you don’t want to be construed as a spammer. - Don’t spam!

Next up is Jonathan Hochman, Wikipedia administrator. We all want him to take Wikipedia down, but alas, we cannot, or Jonathan won’t be an administrator anymore.

Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of traffic share over Digg and delicious. In a way, I am happy about the Digg part.

Here’s what you can do as a marketer: - Answer questions, interact with editors, donate images/media with an appropriate license, report problems, request changes via talk pages. Build goodwill.

Don’t be a dick. Don’t spam, etc.

Here are some newbie mistakes: - Don’t pick a promotional username – those are called role accounts that are not allowed. - Don’t violate copyrights. - Don’t edit stuff that you have conflicts of interests in.

Don’t start stories for yourself. Don’t write about something you’re close to. Don’t spam or you’ll hit the MediaWiki spam blacklist (and you don’t want to get there). IP addresses are not anonymous, so be careful when making edits. The actions can reflect poorly on the company.

Reputation management issue: there was a company that was called out as a spyware distributor (they did, apparently, but they don’t anymore). Fortunately, they do the right thing and talk with the Wikipedia administrators to prevent page vandalism.

Keep in mind that Wikipedia information spreads virally, especially images (they’re licensed by creative commons, which means you need to link the page when you borrow the image). Participation can improve your reputation.

3 links - Wikipedia Business FAQ - Wikipedia Conflict of Interest - Wikipedia Search Engine Optimization

Up next is Stephan Spencer, who covers Wikipedia from an SEO standpoint.

Become a virtuous participant: build edits that stick (clean up spam, fix typos, add to the value to the site in a clearly noncommercial way). Develop that profile over a period of time and you get street cred. Then you can possibly be awarded (the Barnstar award) that acknowledges your contributions. You can change your User page and Talk page to remove some anonymity. Over time, you can become an admin like Jonathan.

Incorporate content edits when adding a link. It makes it harder to revert your edit.

Communicate with the main editor (the guy who makes the most edits) to negotiate with them regarding changes.

If you add links as references, it sticks better because references substantiate claims made in the document. If you substantiate claims, you’re adding value.

What if you wanted to create brand new entries? - Be logged in with a virtuous profile. Wikipedia mantra is that you’re guilty until proven innocent. - Be careful – you can be deleted: AFD (articles for deletion) or the speedy delete. AFD is a discussion; it’s not a vote. People discuss why to keep it and here’s why, versus other people wanting to remove it. - Use lots of references: clear the notability hurdle. Get press mentions. (People, write about me.)

Notability: - Don’t put press releases to establish notability. - Discuss this with people through the talk page if it’s related to your company.

How do you make sure your investment isn’t reverted? Social networks rely on friends. Make sure that they are on top of these changes – work with the people in the community.

Wikipedia has its own politics: Jimmy Wales doesn’t like being “co-”founder of Wikipedia, so his friends try to make the edits. He also wants to bury his history in the porno industry. But the rest of us know – or we do now.

As new tools get developed, you may be found out if you’re manipulating the content.

Next up is Don Steele, who has spoken many times about Comedy Central’s success with Wikipedia. Instead of regurgitating and tiring my fingers, I’ll link you to my past coverage: Wikipedia and SEO: August 23, 2007 Wikipedia and SEO: April 12, 2007 - He talked about South Park (which I’ve written about too). - He talked about the lawsuit between Viacom and Google (he works with Viacom). He can’t comment so he won’t involve himself.

Finally, Lisa “Durova” is up. She’s another Wikipedia administrator who has written for Search Engine Land. Her presentation is about Humans 1.0. She gives accolades to Comedy Central for being involved in Wikipedia in a positive way.

A lot of people come to Wikipedia follow advice that they think is good because it’s in mainstream sources. However, they are not publishing for you – they’re publishing for themselves.

Virgil Griffith is the WikiScanner guy. That is a tool that automated IP lookups for Wiki edits.

If you have a conflict of interest, declare it upfront. Don’t do it behind their backs. A company called Melaleuca made some changes that looked like advertising copy. Two Wikipedians noticed this and they were caught. But the guy denied the involvement – however, this is not the first time that people have done this. Don’t make an article conform to your company branding. If you get banned, don’t post from a different IP address that isn’t from your company headquarters. We know when you’re using proxies. We know when you’re asking your friends. You’re not fooling us. Now, you can’t edit this company’s page. The page is protected to new edits.

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 a contact is simple—simply click on a Yahoo Answers user avatar, and then from their profile page, click “Add to my contacts.”

Unfortunately, although similar to other Yahoo networks, there’s no way to combine or add your contacts from Flickr, for example, to Yahoo Answers Network. Poutanen says that’s deliberate. “Just because somebody provides really good photos, they may not also contribute good knowledge,” he said, adding that Yahoo does plan to provide tools to integrate their various networking services in the future.

The Yahoo Answers team has posted more information about Answers Network on the Yahoo 360 blog.