Social Search May Be the Future of Online Search, but Is It the Future for Yahoo? The Internet is full of Answers.
The search and online portal operator will promote Yahoo! Answers with its largest advertising campaign in Britain since the dotcom boom.
Yahoo! of late announced a service that allows users to ask other people’s advice, when looking for anything from a good hotel or bar to an apple pie recipe, rather than rely solely upon electronically generated search results.
Yahoo! Answers is the latest example of social search, a new trend in online applications that allows people to collaborate and share information online – as epitomized by sites such as Wikipedia, Digg and YouTube.
For some, though, the answers are so plentiful and the information spread out across so many Web pages, that it may be better to leave some questions unanswered. While some people fumble around the Web, wandering aimlessly in search of information, others are wizards with a search engine and can track down the most elusive of facts with little effort.
One solution that has been tried and retried over the years is "social search," calling on the collective knowledge of the Internet’s inhabitants to answer questions posed by other members of the Web community.
Launched in the US at the start of the year and available in test form in Britain since April, Yahoo! Answers is available in 18 countries and has already amassed about 50 million users, who have provided 75 million answers.
Now Yahoo! is launching a nationwide multimillion-pound print, radio and poster campaign to try to attract British internet users to the service. A different celebrity will pose Yahoo! Answers users a question each week for the next eight weeks.
"This is the biggest campaign that Yahoo! has mounted for five or six years," said Stephen Taylor, head of search and search marketing at Yahoo! Europe. "It is a measure of the confidence we have in Yahoo! Answers."
The search giant has stumbled lately, but its popular Q&A service shows that getting people to create their own content can really pay off.
It is also another attempt to widen the scope of the information available on the internet. The first wave of online searching, now dominated by Google, relies heavily upon complex mathematical algorithms to match search terms with information contained in web pages. While useful when hunting out companies, people, products or services, a more nuanced request such as "where is the best restaurant for romance in west London?" requires more than an answer derived from maths.
Yahoo! Answers allows people to pose a question that anyone registered to the site can answer, rather like the Guardian’s Notes & Queries section.
Peer Content Production
Yahoo Answers is another example of the so-called peer production trend. Google, on the other hand, has taken an old-school approach, deploying more than 500 "carefully screened researchers" who answer questions if they like the price the asker is willing to pay. Some answers cost as much as $200.
The give-and-take on Yahoo Answers is decidedly more freewheeling and seems to be connecting with the hordes of young Web surfers increasingly accustomed to user-generated content that costs nothing.
Take the woman who recently sought advice on losing weight. Within five hours she received 21 responses, most sincere, notwithstanding the occasional juvenile gibe.
Moreover, questions on Yahoo! Answers ranged from "how do I get black ink from a Biro out of colored clothes?" and "what documents do you need to enter China?" to "does anyone else think Heathcliff is Earnshaw’s son by a black mistress?" and the inevitable "any ladies want to show me their boobs?"
“We see Yahoo! Answers as a way of tapping into the knowledge that is in people’s heads,” Mr. Taylor said.
Questioners impressed with an answer can rate that person as an expert in a particular field. If other people also obtain good answers from this individual, it creates a league table of the best "answerers" in categories such as food and drink, or beauty and style. Some Yahoo! Answers users in the US have already gained a reputation as providers of trustworthy responses, rather like PowerSellers on the eBay auction site.
The whole enterprise, however, relies upon creating a large pool of people who regularly check back to pose and answer questions. Yahoo! is hoping that over time it will be able to amass answers to questions that its search engine has struggled to provide.
The endgame could be to include data from Yahoo! Answers in search results generated by the company’s main search engine. While Mr. Taylor would not comment on whether this was the ultimate development of the service, he said: "We do see our core internet search and social search getting closer and closer together. Essentially, what you are building is a global knowledge database."
Since the site went live in December, more than 30 million answers have been posted in the United States.
“Yahoo has been rapidly losing market share in search to Google,” says Jim Friedland, senior Internet analyst with Cowen & Co., “so this is a clever way to get people to interact with the site.”
Google has already widened the information available to its search engine through its Google Books project.
While scanning books in university libraries has annoyed some in the industry, who see it as a violation of copyright, information held in out-of-copyright texts is increasingly accessible through its core search engine.
There are a few clouds gathering around Yahoo these days. The Internet star’s delay in rolling out a crucial new advertising system sideswiped its stock price in July, and investors remain jittery about its prospects against Google, Microsoft, and other rivals.
While destinations like controversial encyclopedia site Wikipedia.com, Google Answers, and others have tried to tap into the wisdom of the Web.
But one ray of sunshine is beaming at the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters: a service from the people who brought us the Yahoo search engine and Web portal — Yahoo Answers — is getting a lot of buzz as social search realized.
Others are not convinced. They see the site as just another seedy forum for the Internet’s foulmouthed and lewd miscreants to post sophomoric questions and even more juvenile responses.
An online Q&A service, Yahoo Answers 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.
Get your tens of millions of users to create your next hot product – and then give it away. On Yahoo Answers, anyone can ask any question, from the inane to the articulate, and get a response from, well, just about anyone. For free. It is a MySpace for know-it-alls and the perpetually clueless.
Anyone registered with the site can ask or answer a question, which opens the door to some pretty outrageous posts, but anything truly offensive can be reported by the site’s users and Yahoo can ban or penalize that poster.
The goal, says Tomi Poutanen, director of Yahoo’s social search products, is to complement what Yahoo already does: search.
“It captures the living knowledge of the Yahoo community," Poutanen said. "It’s a much more dynamic environment than a search engine."
While Google Answers requires a minimum $2.50 fee to use its on-call researchers, Yahoo Answers is free to use.
Skeptics, however, argue that there may not be enough good Samaritans on the Web with the kind of focused knowledge and willingness to participate to make the service work and that the road to social search is paved with similar sites and services that have failed.
But maybe the site’s profit potential is a question better put to Yahoo Answers. Who knows, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel might just give you the answer.