Reddit says 80 million people now use its search weekly
Reddit is unifying search with its AI Q&A. It's goal: to become an end-to-end discovery engine where users finish, not just start, queries.
Topic: Question answering
Bing applies AI and natural language models to autosuggest, People Also Ask
Intelligent answers and semantic highlighting are also rolling out to more markets.
Yandex, the big Russian search engine, releases Vega update
Yandex doubled the size of its index, made it faster and added human elements to search.
Google buys expert community and ‘answer engine’ Superpod for $60 million
The speculation is that Superpod founders and assets will be used to improve Google Assistant.
Bing explains how AI-powered intelligent answers can show users two points of view for the same query
Multi-perspective answers is another example of how Bing is using artificial intelligence to inform richer search results.
Answer engine JustAnswer now uses bots to route questions to human experts
The use of bots to qualify questions or leads, which are then handed off to experts or reps, may be the optimal chatbot use case.
Yahoo introduces ‘Answers Now’ app, but will users respond?
The company hopes to address historical quality problems with a matching algorithm.
Preparing to relaunch, Jelly wants to bring “humanity” back to search
In SXSW conversation Jelly founder Biz Stone discussed #NextSearch with Danny Sullivan and teased the relaunch of his social answers engine.
Google Search OneBox Answers Are Getting More Detailed
There are several reports throughout the search community that Google’s OneBox answers or a form of the knowledge graph, are now more aggressive about answering even more complex questions with more detailed responses or answers. When we asked Google about this, a Google spokesperson told us, “we’re always experimenting with different types of answers, but […]
Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Launches New Social Search App Jelly
Building on the concept, “If you have a questions, there’s somebody out there that knows the answer,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and former Twitter colleague Ben Finkel have launched Jelly, a social search app that uses your social networks to deliver results. According to the announcement today on the company’s blog “Jelly is designed to […]
Klout Integration Pushes Human Powered ‘Expert’ Answers Atop Bing’s Search Results
From Yahoo! to Facebook to Quora, social sites have long been struggling to leverage the Q&A format successfully. Today Klout officially enters the ‘social answers’ space with a unique proposition, integration with Bing search — outside of the social search bar and into a big bold listing within the main search pane. The new ‘Klout Experts’ product […]
ChaCha Defeats Google, Bing And Siri In “Answers Quality” Study
A study published today by Indiana-based Butler University compared the performance of a range of search engines and Q&A sites on mobile devices. It found that “ChaCha delivered the highest quality responses consistently across the largest group of categories and question types.” The study was sponsored by ChaCha. However, ChaCha CEO Scott Jones told me via email […]
With $14 Million More Q&A Site ChaCha Soldiers On
Q&A is a great idea that really hasn’t worked. Although Yahoo Answers and a few others are still around — and Ask returned to Q&A as a way to differentiate from Google and general search — the segment is littered with dead bodies, including Facebook’s Q&A offering. The outlook for Quora in its current form […]
Searching For Answers On Ask.com In 2011
It’s been about a year since Ask went back to its roots as a full Q&A site and at the end of last year, we offered up its most popular questions of 2010. In that story from 2010, note that Ask.com claimed 90 million users at that time, and in this year’s followup release of […]
Ask.com Returns To TV With Spot Emphasizing Q&A
Ask.com has a long history in TV advertising; some of it has been entertaining and some of it controversial. But the IAC-owned search engine was on a TV hiatus of sorts during the past couple of years. Now, according to AdWeek, the company is running new TV ads in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The […]
Ask.com Celebrates 15th Birthday
Ask.com the social search/Q&A engine is 15 years old. Founded in 1996 as Ask Jeeves by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen the company has launched a special social site to celebrate its birthday and review events of the past 15 years — mylast15.com. Here’s a brief recent history of Ask: July 1999: Ask Jeeves goes […]
Could Google Play Jeopardy Like IBM’s Watson?
Like many people, I was amazed to watch IBM’s Watson supercomputer playing Jeopardy this week against past human champions. But could Google have done the same thing? Let’s go behind the scenes of these two search masters to understand what they can — and can’t — do.
ChaCha Answers Its Billionth Question, Hits Other Milestones
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 […]
Ask.com To Focus On Q&A Search, End Web Crawling
Talk about getting back to your roots. Ask.com, which originally used humans to find answers to questions, is going further back to its origins by abandoning its web crawling technology. The Need, Or Not, To Crawl Search engines like Google and Bing try to have answers to anything someone might search for by “crawling” the […]
ChaCha, The Tortoise Of Social Search, Keeps Plugging Away
ChaCha, which was one of the early Q&A or social search sites, is something of a survivor. It started out in late 2006 audaciously challenging Google with chat-based human-powered search and then reinvented itself in 2008 as a mobile site, with voice and SMS search. Repeatedly dismissed and even ridiculed it has defied critics and […]
Swingly: New Search Engine Reveals Just The Facts
The days of search engines merely being a middle man are over. Search isn’t about sending users to the right web page, it’s about getting them the information they want as soon as possible — sometimes it’s a web page, but it might also be a sports score, movie showtimes, election information, or some other […]
Facebook Questions Opens To Limited Public Release
Long expected, Facebook’s new Facebook Questions service is now being offered. It allows Facebook users to specifically ask question to and get answers from others in Facebook’s now 500 million strong community. The service just went live at 1pm Pacific Time today, and we’re working on a detailed look at all the features (this is […]
Ask Comes Full Circle With “Q&A” Offering
As Matt posted earlier this evening Ask is in beta on a new approach to search, or perhaps more accurately: a return to an earlier approach but with greater experience and sophistication. The IAC-owned company is returning, conceptually, to its origins as a question & answer engine, when human editors were involved. This has been […]
Ask to Introduce New Q&A Engine Soon
Ask.com was arguably the original Q&A engine. Now the site is seeking to introduce a new product, which leverages both its search assets and the community. We were approached but we’ve yet to formally speak to someone from IAC about the forthcoming launch. However, Silicon Alley Insider today exposes the PR email outlining the plan: […]
Will Quora Challenge Google? No. Is It Useful? Yes
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 […]
Replyz: See The Questions People Are Asking On Twitter
People ask friends and followers lots of questions on Twitter. Now a new service called Replyz is making it easy to find all the questions being asked, answers being given and provides a platform allowing anyone to participate in question-answering on Twitter in an organized manner. It offers much to searchers and search marketers, alike. […]
Yahoo Answers Hits One Billion Answers
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 […]
Ask Making A Bigger Bet On “Social Search” Or Q&A
If you’re the number four search engine in a market that is looking like it’s going to be about two (maybe three) players in the long run, what do you do? If you’re Barry Diller and running the parent company of Ask, the search engine in question, you’re potentially looking at selling, with Microsoft as […]
“Help Engine” Aardvark Makes Twitter An Onramp For Q&A
Danny has described Aardvark as a “help engine” and I’ve called it an “answer community.” Whatever term you want to use to characterize the service it’s very interesting and has enormous potential as a kind of search engine alternative or complement for recommendations, opinions or complex questions. There are other services that are similar though […]
Ask.com Expands AnswerFarm Q&A Database
Continuing its move from being a traditional search engine to an “answer engine,” Ask today has announced that its “AnswerFarm” database has tripled in size, from 100 million Q&A pairs to 300 million. Ask says they’ve also improved the quality of the Q&A database content: “Our semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer […]
Ask.com Goes Back To 1996 With New Release
Ask.com has released version 11 of their new search engine today. The new version somewhat goes back to the Ask Jeeves approach, focusing on providing structured search results, mostly in the form of answers. Techmeme has coverage of the news item, with the main articles currently from the NY Times and News.com.
Microsoft Releases “Renaissance” Version Of Live Search QnA
The Live Search QnA Blog announced a new release of Live Search QnA. Live Search QnA is Microsoft’s question and answer engine, similar to Yahoo Answers. This new release was coined the “Renaissance release,” and includes the following enhancements:
IAC Cuts 8% Of Ask.com & Kills Search Engine
IAC’s Ask.com to Cut Staff, Outlines New Search Strategy from the Wall Street Journal reports IAC has cut 8% of Ask.com’s workforce, by letting go 40 people. Not only that, the Wall Street Journal says IAC is changing the strategy of the search engine to “focus to better answering search queries posed as questions.” Ask’s […]
AOL Buys Q&A Provider Yedda
AOL announced that it has acquired Israeli Q&A provider Yedda for an undisclosed sum. Comparable in many respects to Yahoo Answers, Yedda bills itself as a next generation “semantic” Q&A service. AOL will more broadly integrate the functionality into a number of its sites and properties, as Yahoo has with Answers. The release also suggests […]
Google’s Orkut Gets Polls; Answers Next?
The wisdom of orkut from the Official Google Blog covers how Google’s social networking site Orkut now allows people to post polls. No big deal? Perhaps not. But it also makes me wonder if it’s a first step toward trying to give Orkut an answer search roll for Google.