Yahoo Answers Gets Major Search Upgrades, Email Alerts

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 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.