14 DAY TRIAL // A hot trend in search right now is question and answer sites with a host of new services or updates like the recently launched Hunch or the revamped Mahalo Answers going back to the original Yahoo Answers. Even Wolfram Alpha is encouraging users to ask questions instead of using keywords but second-tier search engine Ask has decided to point out that it was first in launching a question and answer tab on its homepage.
The big difference between Ask and Q&A sites, like Yahoo Answers for example, is the fact that its results are computer generated as opposed to the human contributed ones in the Q&A sites. The new feature however could potentially be a better tool for finding info, as Ask boasts that it has gathered more than 300 million questions and answers in its “AnswerFarm” from all sorts of sources, like Q&A sites or FAQ pages and news and blog articles.
“Our semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance enable us to determine when we have multiple questions that all semantically mean the same thing, so we can aggregate those Q&A pairs, filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats, and thus find the most relevant answers,” said the announcement on the Ask.com blog.
There are merits to this approach as the number of Q&A sites makes it difficult to find the right one; however, by having computer-generated answers Ask.com kind of misses the point of question and answer sites. The reason why people use these sites and their whole appeal is the human input and the greater trust that comes from having an expert in the matter answering your question. Another problem comes from the fact that Ask doesn't include only user-generated content in its results but also content from commercial sites, which may not provide the best, neutral, answer. Still, it could prove useful to have access to a bigger answer pool in order to pick the right one.