Anonymous Patron writes “Does Yahoo have the right answers? An online Q&A service, Yahoo Answers (check out the disclaimer page here) has become the second most popular Internet reference site after Wikipedia, according to Comscore. In June, Yahoo Answers attracted 12.3 million unique visitors, a 35 percent spike from the previous month. (For comparison, media sensation YouTube had 13.4 million visitors in June.) During the same period, 947,000 people clicked on Google Answers, down 4 percent from May.
The secret to Yahoo Answers’s success?
Get your tens of millions of users to create your next hot product — and then give it away.”
paying for it vs. getting it for free
Some thoughts:
1) Wikipedia is quite good in a number of ways. It has problems too.
2) But Yahoo Answers hovers between adequate and comically god-awful.
Go to a subject on Answers that you are familiar with and look at the answers to about 5 or 6 of the questions and you’ll see what I mean. Many of the “experts” are clearly 12 year old boys, crazy or people with limited English skills, which is not indicative of their intelligence but a measure of how useful their answers are.
What is significant to librarians is the popularity of it. Realize how little it takes to satisfy people and how poor the information can be.
I’m not saying we need to abandon all efforts to have and use high-quality information. But ease-of-use is very important and routinely neglected by the library profession.