Internet search player Yahoo! has joined Google in the Social Search space with its Yahoo Answers service that allows logged on members to pose and answer each others questions. Whereas Google is playing it softly softly with a beta roll-out, Yahoo plans to make a lot of noise about Answers with a massive advertising budget, which is its largest advertising spend in the UK for years.
The service has a range of categories that slot nicely into the information industry, including arts & humanities, business & finance, education & reference, health, news, politics & government and science & mathematics.
IWR took a close look and there's a vibrant community posing and answering questions. Needless to say in a social computing environment there's a lot more chit chat and opinion going back and forth. Whether users get the answer they are looking for is really something only those posing a question can answer. What Yahoo Answers does show is there is an engaged community out there looking for answers to everything from casual sex to town councils being measured on pollution levels. For those of us in the information community, a new method of communications has just opened up.
The question is, how do you measure the value from taking part? Links to Amazon and Google Books perhaps?
Answers please?
I would say that Yahoo started the bandwagon. Yahoo started moving in this direction last year with acquisitions of del.icio.us and flickr, and creating their own product MyWeb2. Google is far behind in the social search game. I would argue that Google just plain doesn't understand it.
ReplyDeleteGood points and well made. Yahoo must never be discounted from the development of search and information retrieval.
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