Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Top Q&A Sites Reviewed

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Dec 27, 2006 06:30 PM
from the they-all-seem-to-favor-42 dept.
The Internet News
prostoalex writes "MIT Technology Review runs a real-world test of top question and answer sites — AnswerBag, Amazon Askville, MSN Live Q&A, Wondir, Yahoo! Answers and Yedda. The sites are rated on the features and originality as well as availability of answers to the journalist's three questions: 'First, I searched each site's archive for existing answers to the question "Is there any truth to the five-second rule?" (I meant the rule about not eating food after it's been on the floor for more than five seconds, not the basketball rule about holding.) Second, I posted the same two original questions at each site: "Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?" and "What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich?" The first question called for factual, historical answers, while the second simply invited people to share their favorite sandwich-making methods and recipes." The results might be surprising to some readers. While it's generally believed that small startups are better at building efficient solutions, the leaders of the MIT Technology Review are all sites built by Internet giants — Yahoo! Answers, MSN Live Q&A and Amazon Askville all ranked above the competing sites."
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Top Q&A Sites Reviewed 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Apparently, Ask Slashdot didn't make the cut (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2006, @06:35PM (#17382546)
    It turns out "Just Google it." wasn't viewed as an actual answer.
    • yeah, but then you know that many characters in a search string, a bit tough and usually truncated google side.
  • > While it's generally believed that small startups are better at building
    > efficient solutions, the leaders of the MIT Technology Review are all sites
    > built by Internet giants -- Yahoo! Answers, MSN Live Q&A and Amazon Askville
    > all ranked above the competing sites. ...if I ever need answers to trivial questions that any educated person should not need to ask. I suppose that these sites are probably pretty good for useless crap such as sports and celebrity trivia, too.
  • But what is the meaning of life?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Plutonite (999141)
      That Q almost caused me to flunk my last semester in college, and I'm a high honors grad. It's the shock you get when you realize there isn't any meaning at all. Nothing you can do truly matters or has "purpose". I know you were kidding, but this is the most depressing, madness-instilling question anyone can think of. If you're a deep enough thinker you can end up with a life of crime, ditch your career to sing in bars..etc.

      Life is "wholesome" with friends, family, God, and so on... yet it is purely acciden

  • Helium (Score:5, Informative)

    by fishdan (569872) * on Wednesday December 27 2006, @06:40PM (#17382584) Homepage Journal
    Helium [helium.com] has a pretty unique formula, as well as paying people based on peer review of their answers. I've been there for about a month, and made $1.50. Of course if I can lure more readers there, I'll make more $$. Specifically though, I like the way the answers "battle" against each other, so when you go there you can see the answers ranked in order of "goodness."

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vp_development (789333)

      I actually had not been to Helium in several months, because although I too liked the idea, the content there was dominated by foreign writers looking to make a quick $.35, which probably went a long way in their native land. The problem with that was that they were flooding the site with very poor content.

      I was pleasantly surprised to follow your link and see that things have changed quite dramatically. I actually may send the basic computer security [helium.com] article to some people as a first line of answer t

      • So, Mr. AC, I suppose that means we won't see you around Slashdot much either?

        From the Slashdot/OSTG ToS:

        In each such case, the submitting user grants OSTG the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to

          • Check section 6 of the Terms of Service linked at the bottom of the page. My Firefox is going buggy so it is not letting me copy or paste (or use apostrophes), but the TOS for this site has the same sort of terms.

  • My Advice to Net Newbies (Score:3, Informative)

    by Greyfox (87712) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @06:46PM (#17382638) Homepage Journal
    Net newbies often have trouble coming up with good search terms. I tell them to type a plain english question into Google because more often than not that turns up the right answer on the first page. Try it with "Why does asparagus make my pee smell funny?" for example. That one actually gets the right answer in the first hit. Even when it wasn't explictly designed to do that, Google still wins it. Hmm... I wonder if you could design a google-based chatbot...

  • The reverse perspective (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jfengel (409917) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @06:48PM (#17382662) Homepage Journal
    The article gives an interesting perspective: can you get good answers out? But the reverse perspective is interesting to me: is it worth answering the questions?

    I've been "playing" on Yahoo Answers for a few weeks. I've got a few areas of real expertise, as well as a general interest in, well, stuff. The points are a silly reward; it's not like I'm going to cash them in on a new washer-dryer. But it's just kinda cool to know that my answers are appreciated. And it's sometimes fun to have the questions drive a bit of random web-searching in topics that I'm interested in when I'm otherwise bored.

    But like Slashdot, there are some trolls. They've just this week promised new tools against trolls, but without specifying what they are. It's unpleasant to read some asinine question, clearly written with the intent of pissing somebody off, or seeing how subtly they can ask a stupid question so that I don't feel justified in flagging it as offensive. No, it's not destroying my life, but it gets in the way of what I think of as a game.

    And there are a number of silly questions. No, I'm not going to factor that equation for you; it's clearly your homework. If you'd asked for help on the concept I'd provide it, or even if you explained why you couldn't get this one out of the rest of them. But I'm not doing your homework for you.

  • I have an idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by LaughingCoder (914424) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @06:48PM (#17382666)
    How about asking each of the sites this simple question:

    "Which is the best question answering site?"
  • I wonder what sort of answer that the author would have gotten if he had asked the 100 hour answer board at Brigham Young University which is located at theboard.byu.edu

    The questions range from all sorts of topics, but do tend be Utah centric.

    (Disclaimer: I am a BYU alum, but not a "board writer".)

  • Yahoo! Answers (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bigbutt (65939) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @06:58PM (#17382734) Homepage Journal
    I find that during the day, kids ask how to get around school firewalls and get to myspace. After school hours there are questions on how to customize my space or lots of Indians asking test questions. I speculate there's some pay for test thing going on.

    On the points side, you can go back and select your own answer as the best answer. If no one else selects another answer, yours will be identified as the best answer even if it's crap.

    [John]

  • Experts-Exchange ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bugmaster (227959) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @07:14PM (#17382852) Homepage
    How does Yahoo compare to Experts-Exchange [experts-exchange.com] ? I used to like that site a lot, and I still use it, but their semi-recent redesign (filthy inline ads, sidebar ads, popup ads, light blue on slightly lighter blue text, ads between comments) has sent me searching for something better. But, I have to admit that the quality of the answers I get on Experts-Exchange is still superb.
    • I think most of us here are reasonably adept at finding the answer without resorting to a pay site. I've had EE trickle up on the occasional search until I habitually tack on a -"experts-exchange" to my technical google searches. My daughter seems to like EE though but she's transitioning from helpdesk to a beginning sysadmin.

      I'd say that a free site like Yahoo! Answers is probably worth about what you'd expect. I did ask one question about my guitar that was answered to my satisfaction (electrical problem
    • Hi Bugmaster,

      just today I came across a solution to your problem with EE: It's Platypus, a script for GreaseMonkey, which is an addon for Firefox.
      Briefly, Platypus allows you to repair a Web page/site in a point-and-click way, creating a script that is then run everytime you re-visit that page. So essentially, if you are a Firefox user, you can customize other peoples' Web sites to your satisfaction, including style changes to make them more readable. Highly recommended!

  • Astrosmell (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rhizome (115711) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @07:15PM (#17382872) Homepage
    So, is this an ad for Yedda or Wondir? I can't tell, but the fact that Ask Metafilter isn't in the running suggests some kind of stacking or faulty methodology.

    • There's absolutely no consistency to this guy's scoring at all. A couple memorable quotes:

      ...It was among the best answers I got from any of the other sites.

      (referring to the question "Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?"). He points out that other sites gave him a couple of lame answers, and one of the other ones had a "factoid" (uncited fact?) that none of the other did. Those scored 2 and 3 out of 3 respectively, compared to 1 for having "one of the best answers". So having a bunch of crappy answers thrown in with a good one adds points? Make stuff up to improve fur

  • Learn to use search engines (Score:4, Informative)

    by Four_One_Nine (997288) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @07:17PM (#17382890) Journal
    One of things that leads to too many people finding junk in their searches is that they don't understand the power of search engines. Google is (was?) truly innovative with the things they allow for searching. And it's not rocket science!

    Using things like quotation marks, logical operators, and even more conveniently the 'minus sign' can trim down the results for a search engine that supports them from tens of thousands (or more) to maybe a few dozen key hits.

    The "Google it" approach would probably have yielded results as good or better as most of the Q&A sites if the search terms had been entered correctly.

    • Google didn't invent quotes, the minus sign or other logical search operators -- I was using those back when Altavista [archive.org] was king -- but their site:, inurl:, etc type searches are useful. In Firefox specifically, it's nice to be able to type something like moviename site:imdb.com and have the proper imdb movie page (usually) pop up. At any rate, the real innovation of Google was/is their ranking technique which, although abused, still provides highly relevant results.
  • Just last night i was wondering just how DVD player can play games on my TV. (my neice got Deal or No Deal, not too bad) and googling got me nowhere. Wikipedia only had a list of companies doing it but no tech info. I might have to try again on some of these. I didn't know you could teach the DVD player some of those tricks. For example, after each round it shows the board and the amounts you picked fade out and it shows the previous amounts just like on the TV show. I wonder if anyone could point to how it

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Keruo (771880)
      As far as I understand, DVD games work with menu scripting languages.
      It offers basic operations with disc, and setting certain values to control game state.
      Saving state after removing the disc is impossible tho.
      Grab dvdremake pro from dimadsoft [dimadsoft.com], and import the dvd to "see the code".
      It won't be commented and it'll look something like:
      1: R[0]=12
      2: if hilighted (TRUE) goline 4
      3: jump VTS 2
      4: jump VTS 1

      but if you read it through and figure what each variable does, it should make sense.
  • Google should integrate answers functionality into Google Groups (not the Usenet portion, though). The combination of specialization + economic incentive + the existing post rating system could be very formidable.
    • Googles idea of using economic incentive really doesnt seem like a good one to me. I mean look at all the people willing to answer your questions for free on other websites! Adding the dollar amount only limits your user base. I always assumed that this was the primary reason it failed so badly when offerings from other companies flourished.

  • I mean, Hello!?

    Let's include all the corporate solutions and skip the most commonly used.

    Dur.

    -GiH

    • Wikipedia is not [wikipedia.org] a Q&A site. It's an encyclopedia. It may be a good place to find answers for your arbitrary question, but it is not a question-and-answer site.

      Admittedly, you may find some luck with the Wikipedia Reference Desk [wikipedia.org], but...

      • I think he meant that instead of asking questions, you can find your answers to many things on Wikipedia, without restorting to asking someone questions.

        But yes, if the parent meant it as using it as a Q&A site, then you're of course correct.

  • Ask Metafilter (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PavementPizza (907876) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @07:45PM (#17383054)
    Ask Metafilter kicks the crap out of all of them. Ask Metafilter:these other clowns::Slashdot:Digg. More thoughtful replies, fewer testosterone-driven 15 year old posters.

  • Chacha it? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Luminus (34868)
    I'm not sure why this [chacha.com] site is so frequently dismissed or ignored in these sort of polls and collections of answer sites, but I'd recommend it.
    • I find their idea innovative too, and perhaps helpful especially to those not used to making well-formed queries. Besides, it can be a matter of convenience too. Sending away a question there for someone else to find something you believe might be annoying, and doing something else in another application meanwhile. Having said that, I also found Something Awful's coverage [somethingawful.com] of the site funny too. :-)
  • No. Because nobody else wanted it. By grilling them.

  • Q&A or search? (Score:4, Informative)

    by DocJohn (81319) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @08:47PM (#17383412) Homepage
    I'm not convinced that the questions asked were the best kind to ask in a Q&A community. Frankly, anything that is purely factual seems best answered by Google or Wikipedia and far more easily/quickly.

    Typing these queries into Google found answers to all of them (removing the results from the Q&A sites and related to the article) in the first 10 results.

    I guess people really have gotten so lazy that sifting through a few search results is more work than waiting for a human being to go and do the same thing for you, and then copying and pasting the results into an "answer" on one of these Q&A sites (which is what a large number of the most active Q&A members do on most of these sites).

     
  • Uhh... the five second rule is not about "holding" it (was) about a player dribbling the ball without making any attempt at initiating the offense.

    Sheesh...

  • Very shallow review (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GX-Wemmick (751597) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @09:39PM (#17383680) Homepage
    As someone who's very close to this space, I can tell you that this review was about as shallow as they get. Not only did the reviewer spend no time comparing and contrasting the actual Q&A mechanisms, but he gave random points for random features, a no-no when doing objective reviews. There should be a set list of criteria that each site is compared against. He gave Yahoo Answers 3 points for features, with no real explanation beyond saying they have a "My QnA" page (which Answerbag does as well) and "users can choose and customize their own cartoon self-portraits". I can think of a lot of great features at Y!Answers, but I don't think I'd be handing out 3 points just for the avatars Yahoo has been using for years. Worse, he doesn't explain how he gives points for answer quality. In the Answerbag section, he says the answer about Mormons was "more or less in line with the best answers to this question at other sites", but he only gave it 1 point out of 3. What gives? And for our answer on how to make a grilled cheese sandwich (which seemed pretty good to me), he only gives it a 2 out of 3 with no explanation of where the other point went. What gives? Naturally, as the founder of Answerbag, I'm not claiming that I'm totally objective, but as someone with a background in journalism, I'd like to see a little effort and scientific process go into a review like this. Read a professional home audio review or a car comparison, and you'll see how a real comparison review should be written. I'd love to write a real, scientific review, but I doubt people would see it as very objective. ;)

  • fluff story, but its got the letters MIT (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jorghis (1000092) on Wednesday December 27 2006, @10:21PM (#17383936)
    The comparison in the article is kind of silly. It bothers me a little bit that just because something has the letters MIT on it it is perceived as being more interesting or important. If this had been a state school I doubt it ever would have been posted. Even the good engineering state schools dont get much coverage. When was the last time you saw a link to a student newspaper article appear on slashdot from Berkeley, UIUC, or Georgia Tech? Those schools only make it on here when there is "real" news for nerds happening there.
  • They missed the best one: Ask Metafilter [metafilter.com]. The nice thing about it is that you have to pay $5 to join the site, which automatically eliminates 99% of the trolls and morons.
  • qanda was very confusing as a tag. I'd rather have seen it as 'q&a'. I was thinking "Qanda? Isn't that an Australian airline or something?"

    mandelbr0t

  • The results might be surprising to some readers. While it's generally believed that small startups are better at building efficient solutions, the leaders of the MIT Technology Review are all sites built by Internet giants Yahoo! Answers, MSN Live Q&A and Amazon Askville all ranked above the competing sites.

    This comes as no suprise whatsoever. A Q&A site's success depends directly on how many people use it. The more people there are, the more questions and answers there are going to be. The l

  • 1.Mormons#Scholarly usage [wikipedia.org]

    2.Five-second rule#Research [wikipedia.org]

    3.Grilled cheese sandwich [wikipedia.org] and Cookbook:Grilled_cheese_sandwich [wikibooks.org]

    When all else fails, Wikipedia:Reference desk [wikipedia.org]
    easy really.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.