Question & Answer Search Engines Ranked

Dec 28, 2006 at 9:16am ET by Barry Schwartz

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 with 2%
Windows Live QnA with 1%
Wondir with 0.7%
Askville with 0.11%
Yedda with 0.02%

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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2 COMMENTS ON Question & Answer Search Engines Ranked

LeeAnn Prescott, December 28th, 2006 at 5:28 pm ET:

Thanks for the tip – the review was very interesting and I provided some stats on the sites mentioned on the Hitwise blog.

jgoodrich, December 29th, 2006 at 1:02 pm ET:

It’s funny the choices of sites they picked for Question Answer services. Why didn’t anybody mention FunAdvice.com?

Fact: more than 11K members (when we checked, we’re 4x the size of Yedda)
12,00 questions
26,000 answers

(about double Yedda, and more than 10 times the size of Oyogi)

Yes, we have categorization for questions, a community, and several features that are unique of any site in the QA space. However, despite being online & growing since March, 2003, surveys tend to miss us. The sites reviewed were all featured on TechCrunch ;) Is that the final arbiter of all things relevant.

Honestly, I expect people to do better research, if they’re reviewing the top sites in a niche.

In both quantcast & compete, FunAdvice is bigger than 2 of the sites on your list, and only smaller than Yedda in Alexa…which, as we all know, is very inaccurate when it comes to smaller sites, and only really significant when your site is in the top 500 or so.

Best,

Jeremy

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