Yahoo! Answers - Can’t Find it? Ask Yahoo!
So, we’ve all been there. You’re looking for something online and you’ve searched, and searched, and searched, yet you can’t seem to find it anywhere. This is where Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com) comes in handy.
Yahoo! Answers is service that allows visitors to submit questions to Yahoo!’s user base in the hopes that someone already knows what you’re looking for or at least where to find it.
Aside from being able to ask questions to the Yahoo! community, it also indexes all it’s answers for others to search through as well. Essentially it becomes a human powered search engine that complements Yahoo!’s user base. The only difficult part… anyone can answer questions with little to no oversight.
The True Semantic Search Engine
So, there’s a lot of talk around the web these days about semantic search engines. Essentially, trying to teach a computer to think like a human. However, that technology is obviously not quite ready yet.
Case in point is a search I did the other night while watching Saturday Night Live. There’s a new group called “Kings of Leon” as the musical guest, but unfortunately they don’t tell you the name of the songs.
So, I pulled up a few search engines to see if I could find the names of the song. Naturally I did a search for “What songs did Kings of Leon play on SNL?” However, there were two problems with the “mechanical” search engines I tried; 1. The event was happening right now (recency) and 2. I was asking it a question (relevancy)
The recency issue is a problem because it takes time for search engines to index all the sites on the web. If the event happened minutes ago, there’s a good chance the sites with that info haven’t been indexed yet.
The relevancy issue is another problem all together. Since most search engines are still keyword based, when I searched for “What Songs did Kings of Leon Play on SNL?” it only pulled out the keywords; Songs, Kings of Leon, and SNL. Needless to say, I found a lot of information I was looking for, but not the question I was asking.
So, I decided to click on over to Yahoo! answers… low and behold, other people had the same question and I was able to find it immediately. (btw, it was “Use Somebody” and “Sex on Fire“)
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a hard to find question or one that might be a little too complicated for the Mechanical Search Engines out there, add Yahoo! Answers to your browser. It’s a great resource and an alternative to the alternatives.
