Ask Waves Its Arms To Tell Everyone It additionally Does Q&A Search
June 17, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and reply sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved that and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, and Hunch. Now Ask, arguably the original Q&A search engine (in that it encouraged searches to be asked as a question, not that the answers came from other humans), is waving its arms to remind folks that you can ask questions and find answers there as well.
In fact, it is doing a little more than that. Today, it launched a Q&A tab on its site which taps into a new database of 300 million pairs of questions and answers, which it has crawled and indexed from around the Web. In other words, it is crawling the other Q&A sites to look for the best answers to a specific question. It is plus applying some semantic and clustering filters to group similar questions together and to try to surface the most relevant results. It is more of a search engine for Q&A sites than a Q&A site itself. You can’t reply any of the questions, just search for what other humans have answered on other sites.
At first glance, I find it a bit unsatisfying. I asked it, What is the best Q&A site? Yahoo Answers seemed to be the consensus, but no other choices even surfaced. I tried, What is the newest Q&A site? and it turns up only a one aftereffect from someone on Yahoo Answers asking how to go about creating a
Does Ask even search Mahalo Answers? whether it did, it would have found that question (”What other question and reply services have you used, tried or have found interesting besides Mahalo Answers?”) that includes a enlarged list of more than 25 Q&A sites, many of which I had never even heard of (including Afraid To Ask, Ask An Owner, Blurtit, and Quenchmark).
It is not just that the answers on the handful of queries I tried weren’t so great, it is that taking a purely algorithmic approach to Q&A is the wrong reply. Obviously there are way too many Q&A sits out there and Ask is trying to find the best existing answers from everything that is out there across different Q&A sites. But offering Q&A search without letting public ask new questions or improve the results by offering their own answers kind of misses the whole point of Q&A. It is public helping out citizens to find the best answers to their questions. At least the Q&A startups are trying to move the ball forward by building a community and incentives around Q&A (Mahalo Answers), machine-learning and game-play (Hunch), or let you tap into your direct social circle for more reliable answers (Aardvark).
These sites get smarter the more folks who use them and some of them offer personalized answers as well. The right reply to any question often depends on who is asking. Ask thinks there is one or two right answers for everyone.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s day for you to find a new Job2.0
Comments
Got something to say?