I've run into a few scenarios with Yahoo Answers via Google:
1) Question with answer.
2) Question with no answer.
3) Question with answer, but answer was poor/incomplete/wrong/lacking.
4) Different Question than what I was searching for (irrelevant if answered).
I'd argue the issue is with search results, not always Yahoo Answers. #1 should always appear in search results. #2-3-4 never should. #2 should be easy to filter out. #3 and #4, that's the tough part. Maybe they can appear in search results, but not page one.
Every time you run into #2-3-4, you waste the users time (scarce resource). The more you do this, the greater resentment users have towards Yahoo Answers/Google. If #2-3-4 are occurring ~50% of the time, that's a lot waste. If it's in the 10-20% range, annoying, but not terrible. Less than that and you're doing a "good" job.
The responsibility falls on the shoulders of Yahoo, but also Google:
- If Yahoo reduces #3, search results will be less polluted.
- Stack Exchange does a better job with #3. Their community/insentive-system works.
- Google needs algorithms to eliminate/reduce #2-3-4.
If Google can't do that, they should measure how much time Yahoo Answer's wastes of their users. If it's large, consider de-indexing YA, but that's a nuclear step.
I think it's safe to agree that, as a collective, Stack Exchange has "better" answers than Yahoo, but users don't feel the averages when searching via Google. An answer is an answer, regardless of where it comes from. Google's job should be to present #1 and filter out #2-3-4. YA's/SE's job should be to eliminate #3, and their reward for doing so will mean more satisfied traffic from Google.
I'll take StackExchange over Yahoo Answers for technical topics (where YA is mainly populated by kids posting their homework and spammers advertising tutorial sites unrelated to the question), but YA has been effective for getting information on popular opinion (e.g. what people think are good restaurants where I'm going), expectations in social situations I'm rarely in (e.g. how to properly tip a bartender), etc.
In both cases, it's nice that I'm never the first to want a particular question answered.
I agree. I use it. Sometimes good, sometimes crap, but I use it. This is getting annoying though... Everyone lately has been just spouting what should and should not be in google's results based on what they consider good content. Come on.
BTW, if you like to watch planes take off and land, the Palo Alto airport is another good spot. It's all small prop-driven private planes, so the noise level is quite a bit less than at SFO. And there're some great marsh trails at the end of Embarcadero with benches that are right under the flight path, so planes fly straight over you at an altitude of maybe 50-100 feet:
I don't think that's true at all. Yahoo Answers has often proved useful for me. It also lacks the snootiness of SO. TechCrunch seems to have a serious vendetta against Yahoo. Or maybe Yahoo-bashing is just cool right now. But I remember when the Yahoo CEO mocked Arrington on stage during an interview. It seems personal.
My problem with Yahoo answers is the number of times I've come across answers that are out right wrong (sometimes to the point of being dangerous) and supported by a number other people, with no right answer in sight. For this reason I completely avoid Yahoo answer regarding any topic I'm ignorant of.
This is the reason why I occasionally do answer question on YA! If nobody comes in to fix the obvious errors, it will always be full of nonsense.
The real danger is that the site is used buy a lot of young people who will consistently walk away with a completely skewed and incorrect notion of the subject they are asking about.
As they say: "Be the change you want to see around you".
I'm not sure that grassroots corporate welfare through band-aiding a broken, crappy product with a sewer for a community and zero moderation is what Ghandi really had in mind, there.
Much more effective would be to advance the cause of workable communities or products while starving out the page views of ones beyond repair.
And Gandhi never added qualifiers to his statement. As a matter of fact, the more broken a system is, the more it needs good people to step up and affect change.
I was looking around recently for some information on antidepressant medications. A lot of them have nasty side effects or leave people "happy but empty" and I was curious whether there was any advice regarding these things. One answer which had been left there for a year with no moderation included the following gem: "I recommend you stop all forms of antidepressants and if you get too depressed then just end it. suicide is an option for all people."
Suffice it to say I now avoid Yahoo answers as well.
I don't think this is just yahoo bashing, it succiently reflects user experience.
If you see a yahoo answers link in your search results, do you think "aha, I will click on this first because it probably answers my question"? I get happy when I see stackoverflow in my google results, because I suspect that I will actually get my question answered by clicking that link. A yahoo answers page may or may not be informative, about as often as a geocities page may or may not have useful information on it. Nothing about the site actually really encourages quality, so you end up very hit or miss.
For programming tasks, I am happy to see SO. But for other life inquiries, such as "why does my dog sleep at my feet", I get decent answers from Yahoo. In fact, I never viewed SO as a Yahoo! competitor, but a good complement - their audiences are different, and SO fills a nice niche that Yahoo's demographic is usually not capable of filling
Best answer, chosen by voters begins with: "I dont know the answer to your question."
The rest are a bunch of random guesses by people who don't really know anything about the topic. That's actually exactly the sort of thread I am disappointed to find when I ask a question like that. I could just ask the nearest person or call my mother and get more or less the same results. Honestly, if I spent 30 seconds brainstorming I would probably come up with at least half of that list of answers. I'd turn to the web for slightly more detail and authority, which isn't in evidence there at all.
That being said, I have been surprised at the number of times I've found relevant answers. It's more often than I expect, even if it's not as often as I'd like, and I do find the quality of Yahoo Answers to be less consistent than Stack Exchange,
I agree, I like having yahoo answers in my search result and I can't remember any-day when I was disappointed by answers. Even their answers is peer reviewed and voted for.
CEOs should be careful about their public statements. I am going to bookmark this page because I am sure some day another high-rising CEO will say "Nobody wants to find SO answers in their search results".
The truth now. The problem is that words on the Internet live forever, and most people don't bother to pay attention to date stamps. At some point in the future, StackExchange will be the hulking behemoth that nobody likes, and then people will dig up this post and say "turnabout's fair play".
(It just occurred to me that someday I may come to regret all my HN comments. Gulp. Ah well, it's been fun so far.)
Yes. Or at least be specific so people can tell whether you are providing commentary or reporting on concrete facts.
Even subjective commentary needs to provide context, if it's meant to be useful.
Take the case with Joel (or at least the headline): Joel is saying, basically, "Yahoo Answers suck". It misses context: why does it suck? Does it always suck? Apparently it doesn't always, given that most upvoted comment here is PG giving a reasonable counter-example.
The thing is, objective statements are boring and don't make the headlines. If Joel went to an interview only to say "Gee-whiz, actually SO is doing well because we managed to provide a decent alternative to EE, but for non-programming topics people are still being served by more established players like Yahoo Answers.", there would be no headline for Techcrunch, and we wouldn't be wasting our time discussing about this.
you're right. but that's the kind of thing that got techcrunch where they are, right? it's easy to point back at your accurate predictions, and not remind anyone of the wrong ones.
The headline is sensational, but the interview is good.
I've always liked Joel's observation of Usenet nit-picking culture and how it's likely related to easy quoting.
I haven't followed discussion about StackExchange site creation and user acquisition models, but I think that Joel's practical, organic approach is good. Although there isn't StackExchange for medical professionals yet, if the growth rates are what they claim, it might be that in the near future there are enough doctors participating in cooking, photography and all the other SE sites, that medical SE site will emerge.
His comments on Yahoo Answers' traffic coming from users migrating from Myspace struck me as way off. No one "hangs out" on Yahoo Answers because their tired the lack of anonymity on Myspace. The masses didn't leave Myspace because of any form of stalking.
Interesting interview overall I guess but his comments on this subject really annoyed me for some reason.
That seemed a bit strange to me too. For all I know, Yahoo Answer users are there because they are young, they know the Yahoo brand (maybe from their parents), and they like the cuteness of the site,
I'm usually happy to see Stack Overflow in my search results, but I was reminded of a flaw this morning when I searched for "Manhattan layout algorithm". I clicked the "Show more results from stackoverflow.com" option. It turned out that a number of the SO listings appeared only because they all had the same link in the "Related" sidebar. I don't know if this is a common problem with other sites that list internal links in sidebars, but I only seem to notice it in Stack Overflow results.
(Unfortunately, I never did find a good description of the algorithm.)
Tech Crunch (an AOL property) leading with yet another slam against Yahoo, a competitor? I'm shocked.
I think I'd probably add TC to a google site ban list if I used google search. The difference between the AOL way and a content farm seems to be about ~30 minutes of effort per piece.
The yahoo answers that come up in search results may not be as good as those on stackexchange, but they're generally pretty good if they've ranked high enough on a google search.
For non-tech questions, I encounter many of the other mee-too q&a sites, and they usually yield someone (probably scraped from other sites) asking the question, with no answer. This has been happening with alarming frequency which to me, puts the ball in google's court.
Fixya.com, for example came up as unanswered questions in enough car/DIY searches for me recently that as soon as I saw the google blacklist feature I added them from memory.
Anecdotally, it feels like Yahoo Answers has been more useful for me for non technical topics. Usually, when I'm googling for the name of a song from a commercial or trailer, I'll find a Yahoo Answers page with the info.
I just want to find an answer to my question, I don't care so much where. There are far, far worse places where answers pop up. Like what are these weird mailing list to web converters, where you can not even see the conversation thread properly. Or all those private simple machine forums about the weirdest topics.
I remember when Yahoo! Answers came out it was actually pretty cool. I participated for a while and had fun. Has it deteriorated so much since? And why should other answer services fare better?
Btw, there are a lot of really low quality answers on Stack Overflow, too.
Yahoo! answers does not guarantee the integrity of their information. Most of the time (in my experience), the answers are uninformed and not very applicable. Are you interested in finding people's opinions when actually you are looking for a fact/answer? I am sure some of them are useful and maybe they could secure this by a Hacker News type voting (of course this could be abused, but...).
It's true that none of yahoo's answers are fact, but I would like to point out that almost everything on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt (ahem, wikipedia). That said, your skeptic meter should be higher with yahoo than with SO but that can also be attributed to the fact that SO deals with programming (either it works or it doesn't), so bad answers are going to be discriminated against much more quickly and more correctly.
Joel's really vocal about Yahoo!Answers, which is not fair to Yahoo!Answers. It's a huge site that caters to a broad base of users: take this question from a user
They both have there good reasons for existence. For example, when I was taking Biology and Calculus those specific questions could always be answered with Yahoo. As far as technical questions I think Yahoo has a poor community to answer them while Stack has a very technical community.
What happened to Joel Spolsky? I saw him at a conference two years ago and he looks terrible in this video. Not sure if it's the stress or whatever, but I don't want to see him working himself into a hole... get some time off dude. It's more important than your startup.
No offense, but Joel Spolsky looks pretty worn out and exhausted. Having a startup is great, but I suggest to Joel he take some much needed time off. Your body needs it.
