Yahoo! copies Google Answers
Jeremy posts on the Yahoo! Search blog about Asking the Internet, which points at Yahoo! Answers. The service is setup so that everyone can ask a question and everyone can answer, with nobody paying anything and nobody making any money (excluding Yahoo! of course). They do this because there are some questions that a standard search cannot easily answer and the bigger idea is obviously about building a network of answers that Yahoo! can use in searches. All in all a very good idea but it is old. Google Answers is by now very old and I have been a researcher for years. I actually got a Google Blanket in May 2003 for my membership, which was very nice indeed.
What’s the difference though. With Google Answers, the person asking the question will set a price they will pay for the service and a researcher will be making money on the answer, the big share of the money paid by the researcher to be exact. I always said that this is one of the most overlooked things at Google. They might not make a lot of money with it, but from time to time, the first link in a Google Search is a link to Google Answers now, and it gives a very good answer. They have a great resource there.
What Yahoo! leverages is that they know the web has scaled up a lot more and a lot of people out there would love to build the Me Brand through giving good answers. That probably made them choose a fully free system where they will probably get a lot more questions (as users don’t pay) and if it scales up also a lot more answers. Another good one from Yahoo!
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