Valleywag: Yahoo Answers

Mechanical Zoo's Aardvark to make Lazyweb as hard as possible

Jackson West — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:00:00 PDT

I hope VCs are realistic about any search startup's chances against Google at this stage. Cuil's traffic withered shortly after launch. Another gang of Google graduates at The Mechanical Zoo have revealed scant details of their plans with the announcement of Aardvark. The short version: Rather than asking a search engine questions, you ask your friends instead. Other than that, the social-search-or-something product remains a cryptid. Sounds more like a rival to Yahoo Answers than Google search. "For information you can trust, a person is better than a webpage," promise Aardvark's handlers. Why an Aardvark, the bug-eating African mammal?

Probably because it's the first animal listed in most dictionaries, implying there will be many more products to similarly anthropomorphize. Assuming the funds from the "mega-Series-A round" the company is looking to close doesn't run out first. According to the prehensile news nose of Kara Swisher, the valuation will be "larger than is typical at this stage in the game." Mahalo and Wikia leave me unconvinced that creating new tools to get help from friends on Web queries will ever make a dent in Google's search market share. If I wanted to ask my friends — even strangers — a question, I've got all sorts of social networks I rarely use like Twitter and Facebook. Email and IM work better, anyway. It's called the Lazyweb for a reason. Why make it harder? (Photo by MontageMan)

Google News informs us that the Russians are invading the South

Owen Thomas — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:00:00 PDT

Did you know that Russian troops are thrusting into the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia? That's what readers will learn from a Google Maps graphic accompanying a news story about Russian incursions into Georgia — the nation-state in the Caucasus, not the Caucasian-pride-ridden state in the southern United States. Google's mixup will not help Yahoo Answers user Jessica B., who presciently asked, "i herd on the news that rusia has invaded but i dont see them no where wats going on." A screenshot of Google's erroneous invasion map:

Yahoo's social searcher fired

Owen Thomas — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:42:37 PST

Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo's vice president of "social search," was among those laid off today. Yahoo's attempts to harness its vast user base to improve search results has never borne fruit. Since Yahoo has said it's cutting back in areas not deemed critical to its future, is Bonforte's departure a sign that social search no longer matters? Unlikely, since Yahoo recently incorporated Del.icio.us, the Web bookmarking service it bought from Joshua Schachter in 2005, into its search results. And management of Yahoo Answers, another Bonforte responsibility, was moved to Europe. More likely Bonforte, ostensibly Schachter's boss, was deemed inessential to the effort. Yahoo's layer-cake bureaucracy is being sliced away.

Yahoo Answers more popular than the iPod

Jordan Golson — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:00:35 PST

Atop Yahoo's response to the Microsoft takeover bid, Yahoo has this "fun fact": more people use Yahoo! Answers than own an iPod. That's great! Now if only Yahoo could get each Answers user to pay $181 apiece, like 22 million iPod buyers did to Apple last quarter, it wouldn't be in this mess.

Google relaunching "Answers" as Yahoo clone

Jordan Golson — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:20:12 PST

Google is relaunching its failed Answers product as a Yahoo Answers clone, say the sharp-eyed obsessives at Google Operating System. In the original Answers, questioners would offer cash for answers and a researcher would provide them. As a result, the questions were usually highly detailed and meticulously factchecked. In the new version, supposedly titled Google Questions and Answers, the service would be free to use but presumably have the same accuracy problems that plague Yahoo's version.

At today's Google, however, quality is Job 101. Given Yahoo's overwhelming success with Answers, it's no surprise that Google is getting back in the game. One hopes, though, they'll add at least something of a Googly touch to the product. For example, why not take normal questions and parse them as search queries?

"What are the best pizza joints in Boston?" might return high-ranking results from sites like Yelp, rather than making searchers type "pizza boston, ma" and finding results themselves. Now that would be a service for the 95 percent crowd. Maybe Larry Page will get cracking on that when he's back from his honeymoon.

(Photo by Scoobymoo)

Amazon Askville to take on Yahoo Answers

Jordan Golson — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:39:52 PST

Amazon has officially launched Askville, its version of Yahoo's wildly successful pageview generator Yahoo Answers. On Yahoo's site, the questions get answered through the generosity of its users. Askville will bribe users with Quest Gold, redeemable for Amazon.com gift cards (for a limited time). Google Answers, which was shuttered a year ago this week, had questioners pay to get their questions answered. Time will tell if this scheme will be able to compete or if it will fail like it did the first time. That's right: This is Askville Version 2.0. It launched last year to underwhelming response. Next time, Jeff Bezos should ask if anyone wants him to do anything besides sell books.

AOL to satisfy priapic quest with Q&A site

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:27:36 PST

AOL announced it bought Israeli online questions-and-answers service Yedda. Yedda, we're told, uses a semantic engine to match user questions to other related questions and topics. It also searches for other users who might be best to answer the question. The idea behind this type of service (Yahoo has a similar one) is that consumers trust each other when making buying decisions, so a nice place to serve an ad is in the middle of their conversations.

Here's how the theory is supposed to play out. Consumer A asks, "What's a good car to buy?" Another consumer, B, answers, "I really like my Prius." Next to this answer AOL inserts an ad, "THIS IS OUR COUNTRY. CHEVY."

Of course, users don't always play along. For example, one might ask as we found one did on Yedda's site this morning, "the size of dick? is my dick big? I got 15 cm on full hard on." Come to think of it, that's not such a bad place to put a Chevy ad, either, though AOL ad salespeople might have a tough time selling GM media buyers on the idea.

We don't know how much AOL (over)paid for Yedda. We'd ask the question on Yedda, but we know better, so tell us. Also, didn't Google give up on its own Q&A service a year ago?