Yahoo Answers All

Search Engine Watch reports on the new Yahoo! Answers, that started just now. Some other comments are here and here.

Questions can derive from all sorts of areas, even things like „where can i get the best coffee in Frankfurt“
The whole system relies on points that are given for each answer and which rank the respondents in terms of trustworthiness.

I like this approach of Yahoo! as it much more resembles the true web as it is coming to be, then Google Answers, where the people asking questions have to pay „experts“ for their answers, as Business2Blog writes.

Yahoo!’s approach is much more „wiki“, where everyone can write, and it goes much more along the lines of „wisdom of the crowds“ where the aggregated masses know more than the single expert in his lonely office.

It’s still in beta, so we’ll have to wait if it works. But just by choosing this approach, Yahoo! proved that they understand the fabric of todays web much better than Google.

(Nevermind Yahoo! „choosing“ Flickr, myWeb, etc. – taking all their recent efforts into consideration, they clearly a very good sense of what’s driving todays social web developments)