FOR the guy in charge of promoting Yahoo! Answers, Bradley Horowitz seems awfully preoccupied with questions these days.
What, for example, did Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Hawking, and Bono hope to learn from the "wisdom of the crowd$%:"
The celebrity questions are part of a clever effort to drum up interest and participation in Yahoo! Answers, the Internet giant's poster child for "social search."
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Yahoo! Answers () is a free service that enables visitors to ask questions on any topic and have them answered by other people online. The same online community gets to vote for the best answers.
Social search, explains Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo!, is the next phase of Internet search.
Most recent news:The first phase, pioneered by Yahoo!, focused on human-edited directories that organized Web pages according to content in a hierarchical fashion.
The second, marked by search engines such as Altavista, used software to ferret out pages on the Web as these became too numerous to catalog manually.
The third phase, marked by the ascendancy of Google, provided more relevant results by combining search algorithms with an analysis and ranking of Web pages based on the number and quality of other pages that linked to them.
Social search combines the best properties of the first three phases. In Yahoo! Answers, for example, answers are filtered through a grading system that lets members of the online community rate the quality of answers.
"Search today, while powerful, is inherently limited. It connects keywords to Web pages. Yahoo! Answers provides real answers to real questions," says Horowitz.
To post questions or answer them on Yahoo! Answers, you'll need to log in using a Yahoo! ID. A point system offers incentives for answering questions well.
A first-time user gets 100 points to start and can use these to ask questions. You gain points by logging in, answering questions, choosing the best answer to your questions, or by voting for the best answer to other questions. Active participation enhances your online reputation, which is measured by your accumulated points and level.
Since the service was launched a year ago, Yahoo! has introduced 20 localized versions, including one for the Philippines (). These local versions enable visitors to post questions to and receive answers from their own online communities.
All told, the service draws 90 million users a year, and has generated about 250 million answers, Yahoo! says.
Adding some star attraction to the service, Yahoo! has encouraged celebrities to ask their questions online, giving ordinary people the chance to interact with them.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, for example, asked how ordinary Americans would improve health care in the United States.
Oprah asked: "If you were given $1,000 to change the life of a perfect stranger, what would you do$%:"
Stephen Hawking wanted to know how the human race could survive the next 100 years, and U2's Bono asked what we can do to make poverty history.
In Malaysia, Yahoo! invited awarded movie director Yasmin Ahmad to ask her question, and she wanted to know what could be done to nurture and support aspiring Malaysian filmmakers. At last week's launch, Yahoo! was still screening choices for a Filipino celebrity.
There is no guarantee that celebrities will really listen to the answers, of course. Clinton, for example, received over 38,000 replies in just two days--then left it to the community to pick the best answer, a move that many felt was a cop-out.
Remarked Barry M: "I wonder why anyone actually thought Hillary would listen to anything we had to say. Have you ever seen any politician ask a question and then 'listen' to the answer$%: If you expected her to read your answers and choose a winner, you should have included a blank check with your initial response."
Undeterred, I logged on and asked my own question: "When will Yahoo! finally support Linux on Yahoo! Widgets$%:" Horowitz didn't know, so I figured maybe someone else would. It's been three days--and I've received only one reply. Sadly, it wasn't from anyone at Yahoo!--and it wasn't even very useful.
Trivial as this example might seem, it highlights one serious challenge that Yahoo! needs to address to make Answers even more responsive: making sure that the right people see the right questions.