Yahoo Answers Hits 10 Million Mark; Answers Creeping Into Regular Search Results
Yahoo patted
themselves on the back for reaching the 10 million answers posted mark on
Yahoo Answers. Part of that announcement
was the fact that Yahoo Answers are appearing both organically and through
vertical means into the search results.
As SEO Book also
points out a search on
best dog for apartment will show few results from Yahoo Answers in the
organic listings. Also a search on
harley davidson
will show a Yahoo Shortcut at the bottom of the results page to Yahoo Answers.
The vertical results are nice, but will webmasters begin to complain that
Yahoo has a bias towards their own content in the organic results?
Postscript From Danny: 10 million is an impressive number, especially
compared to the only 1.2 million (1,183,320) bookmarked pages in the slightly
older My Web service that Yahoo also runs. That social search service feels like
it is faltering, so perhaps question answering will be how Yahoo gets people
involved.
Meanwhile, how’s Google Answers doing? I’ve never seen a total number of
questions reported. Poking at it, a search for
the and
a both give 129,373 matches while
-djjdjjdjkkdd (a word
not in Google Answers, so looking for answers without that word should give
a total count) gives 142,005 matches. So if you trust the counts, Google Answers
has dealt with only a fraction of what Yahoo has already covered — and more
than half of those
unanswered. That’s if you trust the counts. I don’t.
Plus, counts don’t necessarily mean answers. For example, look at this "question"
on Yahoo Answers: "What Is Your Favorite Punk Rock Band." It’s more a discussion
that getting a particular question answered. Still, there are definitely lots of
questions being answered elsewhere on the service, and kudos to it for hitting
this milestone.