The Q and A Webspace Part 4

Back to my post “The Q and A Webspace Part 2″, talking about Google Answers. The researchers who were making a living from answering questions, decided to create a similar website after the shutdown of Google Answers. So Uclue started in 2007, and was very similar to Google Answers as a fee based Q and A service. Currently, only former Google Answers Researchers may apply to become Uclue Researchers. It is the place for you if you need to ask complicated questions that demand research and expertise. For example a question like this one:

What are the effects of Social Networking on Real Estate Regulation?

Do you expect to get a satisfactory answer on a free Q&A website? Most probably not, but you will probably get an answer with lots of details and information if not a full essay if you ask it on Uclue with a good offer.

No much work is done on Uclue feautres and design. So it still feels like a website from the late nineties.

Another good Q and A website is BlurtIt, it has a good simple interface, has less categories to keep it simple, users can even ask and answer as guests without creating an account. Like AnswerBag  it is available as a facebook application, and also available as a service on Twitter.

End of last year Mahalo.com started a QandA free service still in its beta. It is unsurprisingly called Mahalo Answers, similar to Yahoo Answers, but it allows tipping of answerer, which will definitely encourage more members, and encourage more participation, but still has way smaller user base than answers.yahoo.com

From all the mentioned QandA services, I have used Yahoo Answers the most, if you have a Yahoo acount and you need a service that integrates with other Yahoo services, and you need answers within minutes of your question then Yahoo Answers is for you. If you are a facebook user and you like to use facebook applications then go for Answerbag. If you like the Wiki concept and you want to contribute a better quality answer question database then Wiki Answers is the one for you. If you need to ask questions that need extra work and research to answer and you are ready to pay a small sum of money then Uclue is there for you.

PS: Sorry no comparison table of features and traffic..etc.

The Q and A Webspace Part 3

Answer Bag (www.answerbag.com) is another example of popular free Q and A service. It started in 2003 and then acquired by Demand Media, the same company that has also www.ehow.com, a website that, at the time of writing this post, has more than 1 million instructional articles and 170,000 instructional videos. Answerbag still have smaller community than that of yahoo answers. But has more features like being able to post videos and pictures along with the questions, and better control of the quality of questions and users, for example by flagging questions as “non sense”, “duplicate”, “wrong category”..etc. Also what puts Answerbag apart is its API that enables developers to read and write from its Q&A database.

For better quality questions and answers, there is www.wiki.answers.com which is based on the wiki concept, where anyone can edit and improve answers. I think a system with one answer by question, that keeps getting improved is the best way to maintain a quality Q AND A database. Also Wiki answers has the best control over duplicate questions. And as it leverages Wiki concept, you can ask questions without singing up for an account. The number of categories is definitely the biggest, but the drawback of this site is its big number of ads, specially Google ads all around, and unlike in Yahoo Answers the layout does not help a lot to tell ads from non ads.

In the next post I will talk about other maybe less popular Q and A services.