The Answers Community. Review on Answers.Yahoo

1. You are hunting for some notes for that important lecture at college and you have searched all the books in the library and still haven’t found it. You have scoured the internet for hours at a stretch and still haven’t had any success. Where do you turn to?

2. Your girlfriend/boyfriend is not on talking terms with you. You have tried your level best to get him/her to talk to you. You have apologized for your behaviour and have done all possible sweet talks but it did not yield any success. What do you do now?

3. You are about to move to a new town about which you do not have any information. Lack of time does not permit you to take the trouble of personally investigate and find out more about the new town. Who do you turn to now?

4. You are planning to buy that laptop that you’ve been eyeing for the last 2 months but websites like mouthshut/epinions/etc do not provide you with proper user feedback. You are confused. What do you do now?

The answer to all these(and many other) questions is unanimous – Yahoo! Answers.

Yahoo! Answers was started on Dec 13, 2005. It allows users to ask questions and seek answers for them while at the same time it encourages the users to answer the questions posed by others as well.

It was a community created for the users of Yahoo and was modelled on the lines of Google Answers with the exception that unlike Google, Yahoo! Answers was a free service. The fact that Google Answers was a paid service meant that their community, although searchable through search engines, had a very small user base, and predominantly based in the North America and to some extent Europe as well. Google Answers has since then closed down. Yahoo! Answers on the other hand, has flourished into a popular service for its users.

Starting off with Yahoo! Answers is very simple. Sign in with your Yahoo! Id and create a public and private profile for yourself. You are allowed to choose a different screen name from the one you use in your Yahoo! Chat or Mail. There is complete protection of your privacy, you are given the options of allowing people to add you directly to messenger or to send mails to you(your email address is never revealed). You can upload your own picture or use your Yahoo avatar, the same that you use for chat and email. Now you are all set to go!

The Yahoo! Answers community has a point system and each new user is given 100 points to start with. Each question you ask on the forum takes away 5 points while each answer that you give to reply to others’ questions will fetch you 2 points. Every question is open for a limited period of time and you can post a reply to it during that period only. There is an option for extending this period if you are not satisfied with the replies you get. You will get an email alert for each answer received by your question.

Answering a question is quite simple. Just hit the answer button just below the question and post your reply. You are given a search box which you can se to search the internet using Yahoo search or Wikipedia and find the appropriate answers. You are then given a preview of the answer before it actually appears on the question page.

The more you answer, the more points you can amass. The more points you amass the higher you get on each level. In other words, Yahoo! Answers has a system of various levels with restrictions upon the number of replies you can post each day or the number of questions you can ask, depending upon the points that you have amassed. You get more privileges as you get up to higher levels.

Some may wonder what these points are for. Can they be redeemed? Well, the simple answer is No. The points are there for nothing. You can only boast of getting as many points as you have. They are displayed on your public profile as well. The most important purpose of the points system is to encourage people to be more active on the community, because of the lure of getting to a higher level and get more privileges and be promoted as one of the featured users on the Answers community blog.

Since its inception, the community has seen various new and innovative changes as well. One of them is the thumbs up or thumbs down system, using which you can promote good answers and discourage people from giving bad answers. You can even keep a watch on some questions by starring them.

A question is usually open to accept new answers for 4 days though it can be extended as well. Once you are satisfied that you have received sufficient number of answers you can put them up for voting. You can yourself choose the best answer among them and once you do that, the question is resolved and is closed. The person whose answer is chosen as the best answer earns a cool 10 points for it. So far I have posted more than 200 answers myself on this community and about 20% of them have been chosen as best answers.

A recent innovation is the creation of networks which I find quite similar to the Mouthshut Trusted Circle. You can add people who give good answers to your network and block people who give irrelevant replies.

The Yahoo Answers community has been established in many countries, including India. Country specific links can be found at the bottom of the homepage.

While there are seemingly endless number of questions and answers, one major issue with this forum is that many a times questions tend to get repeated by people who are eager to find quick replies. Therefore it is a good idea to use the search mechanism to first find out if the information you are seeking is already available on the community or not. Another criticism is that people, especially in the developed world, often use this medium as a quick fix solution to get school home work done. Often you find people saying that the first person to reply correctly will get best answer, almost as if they are conducting a quiz rather than seeking a solution. It should be avoided at all costs.

Many a times you can find celebrities and important people asking thought provoking questions. Last year our President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam also asked an open question which generated a whopping 29000 replies! Some of the people who answered the question included Dr. Kiran Bedi and Leander Paes.

As an endnote I would say that the Yahoo Answers community is good options to turn to if you want answers to some specific questions, which may involve seeking the opinion of others rather than finding out facts about a place/object/historical event/etc. This in my view is the best use of the community in a positive way.