The popularity of Web-based Q&A services continues to rise with the exploding growth of social networks and mobile markets. This trend will likely benefit both, users and advertisers, while accelerating the use of the Web as an information source. Many big names Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Apple and Facebook have released social Q&A sites where people ask each other questions and get answers. Some well-known Q&A sites include Quora, ChaCha, Aardvark, Facebook Questions, Yahoo! Answers, and Siri.
Web-based Q&A Services
Q&A sites are online communities built on sharing information. Users ask questions, which are distributed and the community responds by giving quality answers. Some services reward responders either with money or rewards through a point-reward system. This means that responders, who receive high ratings, usually give the best answers.
Benefits For Users and Responders
Q&A sites benefit all parties involved, the community of users and responders, as well as the Q&A site. Users are able to obtain answers for free from responders who share facts, opinions, and personal experiences. Responders are rewarded by payment, recognition and more online visibility. Q&A sites also gain from their community. Information sharing improves their online visibility on the social web and search engines and boosts the traffic directed to the sites. In addition, Q&A sites collect valuable user data, which can be used to for targeted advertising.
Quora
Quora is the trendiest Q&A service right now. People use Quora to document the world around them while allowing the site to built a database of knowledge. The site is a straightforward Q&A service that continually improves the collection of questions aimed at making each question page the best possible resource for anyone who wants to know about the questions. Users can write their own answers to questions thereby building a question page that could become a better resource with more information added it over time.
Quora also provides users with the opportunity to specify topics of interest and expertise, and ask the community open-ended questions on any subject. There are some other novel features, such as the ability to follow topics, specific questions and people. Quora can track trending topics to show users the most popular questions. The site prides itself on enriched content in comparison to other Q&A sites. Quora recently added a new feature, “posts” which lets users post a text bulletin to their followers.
Quora was founded in June 2009 by Adam D’Angelo, most known for his past role as Facebook’s CTO. The site quickly became a hit Q&A site with the Technorati crowd. The site was valued by investors at $86 million based on advertising potential and growth of its user-base. The site started as invite only and is now open to search engine indexing. Many users were concerned when Quora opened its site to search engines thinking it could damage the quality of queries, but there has been no significant change.
ChaCha
ChaCha is an SMS-based mobile search Q&A service that pays users (guides) to find answers to questions. The service includes a voice search service that can be accessed from a mobile phone via a toll free number (800.2CHACHA). The standard SMS text is ‘CHACHA’ (242 242). The site uses a traditional algorithmic search to retrieve questions and answers from its archive of answers. Since initial launch with over 2500 guides, ChaCha has built up an army of users, including college students and stay-at-home moms. Users can call or text a ‘Guide’ for answers on their cell phones anytime for free; any mobile phone works. The service sends questions to the most knowledgeable guides on that topic, who then answer back via a text message. Every guide starts as an apprentice, and must pass a series of tests before they can move up to Pro-level. Pro’s have the option to interact with the public and get paid $5/hour. The highest guide level is “Elite”. They receive $10/hour, plus 10% of their network’s earnings. The site manages the guide team with a social network called the ChaCha Underground. Users have profile pages with links to their sponsor, their buddies and members of their network. ChaCha primarily makes money from ads served on search pages.
Aardvark
Aardvark (formerly Mechanical Zoo) is a social Q&A search service. The site lets users ask questions that are transferred to the users’ friends and friends-of-friends who may have the knowledge and expertise to answer the questions. Aardvark typically consults with a users’ social network within two or three degrees of separation to find relevant answers and information.
Aardvark is available to users who submit full-text questions via the Aardvark website, email, Twitter or instant messenger. Currently Aardvark supports AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.
Users who sign up give Aardvark access to one of their social networks – Facebook, LinkedIn or the e-mails in their contact list. Users then indicate what things they are confident answering questions about. Upon receiving a question Aardvark initiates an email or live chat conversation with one or more topic experts in the submitter’s extended social network. A responder may type-in the answer to the question, a friend’s name or an email address to refer the question to someone who may know the answer or simply type in “pass” to pass on this request.
Aardvark publicly launched on the web in October 2009 and was acquired by Google in 2010.
Facebook Questions
Facebook Questions, a Q&A service similar to Quora in purpose and function, was released before Quora ever achieved a mainstream following. The service allows users to ask any question, explore topics and get quality answers from the entire Facebook community. Questions and answers submitted by users are visible to the users’ friends through News Feed and can be shared with all Facebook members. Questions are tied to a users’ real name; and likewise, anyone who answers a question will have their response tied to their account.
Facebook Questions has an obvious advantage over Quora and other competitive Q&A services due its massive “built-in” user base of over 500 million Facebook users. However, Facebook isn’t going to ask a question to the entire user base; instead it show the question to some of the users’ friends and deploys an algorithmic system that is going to analyze a user’s interests to determine who would be best able to answer the question.
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers is the oldest community-driven Q&A site. The site is a place where people ask each other questions on any topic, and get answers by sharing facts, opinions, and personal experiences. Users must categorize their questions by topic, making it easier for others to find and answer them. A question is open for others to answer for up to 4 days. Once a question is answered, users can review selected answers or have the community vote for the best answer. Users who want to answers questions can use the category list on the left side of each page to find open questions related to the topic. Users can also use the search box on the left side of each page to locate questions and answers. Yahoo! Answers has a system of points and levels to encourage participation and reward great answers. While users can’t use points to buy or redeem anything, Yahoo! Answer allows users to recognize the quality of the users’ answers. The site has been available since 2005 and has had 64,928,634 visits. Now Yahoo! Answers is also available as a mobile Web app.
Siri
Siri is an Apple-owned artificial intelligence mobile search application. The non-human Q&A service eliminates the social and instead focuses on the science of finding the right answer. Looking forward, Apple believes the most useful mobile applications are those able to search data on the Internet and bring users exactly what information they need. Right now Siri acts as a voice-operated personal assistant app for the iPhone that could be the foundation to lead the future of mobile search and discovery.
Social Q&A search services have expanded the options web users have to find information online beyond search. Getting answers to complex, subjective and/or time-sensitive queries, that computers simply can’t address, is now available through a variety of social Q&A search services. People are sometimes the best source of information; they can help with offering options or give insight about where to find answers. As the Web is increasingly used as a conversational medium and web users are increasingly asking questions we will see this space become a larger part of our online experience.