Who's Asking? A Roundup of Q&A Sites
Yesterday Google's Russian Blog announced the launch of a new site on Google Russia called "Questions and Answers." The site uses a points-based system, where questions cost points and users are rewarded for participation (answering, rating, even logging in all apparently earn you points). This development has caused a lot of speculation about whether the Google Answers program, which was shut down last year, would be making a return in English-speaking markets.
Of course, it remains to be seen if the Google Russia project makes its way onto Google proper, but in the meantime there are a ton of other question and answer sites that you can use now. Below is a round up of places you can go to get answers that are hopefully more accurate than a fortune cookie.
Free Sites
- Yahoo! Answers - The largest of all the sites by far, Yahoo! Answers stole the crown from Google by creating a free question and answer community.
- WikiAnswers - A Q&A community based around a wiki. Anyone can answer a question, then anyone else can come along and edit the answer to refine it.
- Askville - Amazon's Yahoo! Answers clone.
- NowNow - Another Amazon Q&A site: ask a question and get three answers by email. Though free during beta, NowNow uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service to pay real people for answers. They anticipate costs in the $0.25/question range.
- Yedda - Standard free question and answer site.
- Lycos IQ - A Yahoo! Answers clone from Lycos UK that also incorporates social bookmarking.
- Live QnA - Microsoft's Yahoo! Answers clone.
- LinkedIn Answers - Focused on business questions.
- Trulia Voices - Real estate Q&A.
- Minti Questions and Answers - This one is all about parenting.
- Wondir - Similar to Yahoo! Answers.
- Rediff QnA - A question and answer site from Indian portal Rediff.
- Fluther - One of the newer sites. Fluther supposedly learns the type of questions you like to answer as you use the site and directs more relevant queries your way.
- Wis.dm - Another fairly new site, Wis.dm focuses on yes/no questions.
- Answerbag - Similar to Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag tries to break down questions into social (fun), expert (serious), local, and shopping areas.
- Oyogi - Oyogi had a lot of promise when it first appeared, but now seems to be a ghost town.
- Say-so - Say-so lets you give people a choice of answers (like this).
- Grupthink - Not questions and answers, but 'open-ended topics' and 'opinions' at Grupthink. (It's like Yahoo! Answers with thumbnail photos and comments on each answer.)
- Dizzay - A very basic Q&A site.
- KnowBrainers - A question an answer site with a MySpace-like social network attached.
- The Answer Bank - A simple answer-based community from Britain.
- PointAsk - Standard Q&A fare.
- AllExperts - Ask questions directly to volunteer experts.
- Able2Know - A question and answer system built on top of a forum (looks like it started out as phpBB).
- AskMe Helpdesk - Ask volunteer experts and then tip them with cash if you get an answer you like (and you're feeling charitable).
- What Should I Say? - Work and relationship advice seem to be the most prevalent topics at What Should I Say?
- Simply Explained - Similar to Yahoo! Answers, the more you participate, the higher your "expert rating" can go.
- Ask a Librarian - Send questions by email to a network of librarians using this service from the US Library of Congress.
- Askeet! - Askeet! is a near direct clone of Yahoo! Answers, but it's also the demo project for the Symfony PHP framework. So if you want the source code for your very own Yahoo! Answers clone, then look no further.
Pay Sites
- Uclue - Uclue is almost identical to the old Google Answers. In fact, it was started by ex-Google Answers researchers. Ask a question, set a price, get an answer.
- JustAnswer - More or less the same thing as Uclue, though perhaps in a prettier package.
- Kasamba - Live chat with paid experts who charge their own price by the minute.
- Ask.MetaFilter - In order to cut down on spam, MetaFilter's Q&A site charges a one-time $5 registration fee.
- ExpertBee - Experts bid on your question at ExpertBee and you pick the one that gets to answer.
- Experts Exchange - Ask questions directly to experts; this site charges a monthly fee to participate.
Other Sites
- ChaCha - Experts guide you on your web search and help you find the results you're looking for (or, that's the idea).
- Ether - Ether lets people set themselves up as paid phone consultants. My guess is that at some point they might set up a directly of consultants using their service.
- Qunu - Talk directly to experts via a Jabber IM client.
- Everyday Questions - The idea here was to take questions and answers and turn them into funny flash cartoons. Doesn't seem to have happened, but that hasn't stopped people from continuing to ask questions (if not actually answering them).
Conclusion
There are so many question and answer sites out there that one company actually does marketing services specifically targeted at these sites. I was actually very surprised by how many of the above web sites are quite active. Personally, Uclue is the only one I have any meaningful experience with -- and I was satisfied with the results I got for my $10. Which of these sites would you recommend? Did I leave any off the list? Let us know in the comments.
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The translated announcement from Google reads "We are particularly pleased to announce that Russia -- the world's first country where we are launching this service", which suggests the service may be making a return in other countries as well.
It's not well promoted on the site, but eNotes.com has a pretty sweet Q and A system for students with questions on literature and maybe other stuff. got me through last semester :). check it out: http://ref.enotes.com/q-and-a/
Nice roundup. NetworthIQ just launched Q&A specific to personal finance (i.e. a community of financial advisers) last week
http://www.networthiq.com/questions
I've used Grupthink ( http://www.grupthink.com ) nearly exclusively for my Q&A needs since I discovered it late last year - I've found most every other site's attempt at aggregating and quantifying questions / answers / opinions much too "stiff" for my taste. Grupthink, in contrast, is just plain fun :)
Thanks for your kind comments about Uclue.
Uclue will probably always be a tiny business compared to Google, but we believe strongly that there is a need for a paid Q&A/Research service similar to what Google Answers used to be, and we're enjoying providing that service.
Another free site to add to your list is FunAdvice
http://www.funadvice.com/ which seems to be an upbeat site with lots of young people answering each other's questions.
You might also want to add the following to your list. They provide infrastructure that allows others to run their own Answers service.
1. Tinbag - they provide an online service that allows an individual to become their own answer service, earning money from providing help and advice.
http://www.tinbag.com/
2. AskPert - Software using PHP and MySQL that can be installed on a webserver to implement an Answers Service. We started with this at Uclue and are modifying it to meet our needs better. The software costs $149, plus an extra $69 if you want to remove the link back to them, and you can freely modify it.
http://www.w3matter.com/products/askpert/
3. AskMe Pro - Another software package using PHP and MySQL that, according to its supplier, allows you to "Run your own Google Answers expert advice service". The software costs $99, and you can freely modify it.
http://www.alstrasoft.com/askme.htm
I wanted to add Askpedia.com to the list.
We provide a knowledge sharing community using Questions and Answers. We also provide a knowledge marketplace where people can post financial rewards for best answers.
You can view our site at http://www.askpedia.com
Thank you, nice one.
http://www.ebooksdb.net
What are the issues faced by QA websites?
Josh a few points. These are not cynical comments but comments of a reader that enjoys your posts and finds this one could have been better:
You end your post with a conclusion but there is nothing in the post, apart from a list of website! What are concluding about?
I think that the QA market is in a very interesting period and I think that Google’s move could call for a more interesting post than list of players in the QA market.
Here are a few of the questions and issues facing the QA website market. It would be interesting to read your opinion and the reader’s comments concerning these questions:
There are more questions but I think these would do for now.
Also, a general comment Josh. I find posts that cover-3-5 players more helpful and insightful. For a complete list of QA website I could use Google. What I’m looking for in RWW (my first reading each day) are editorial insights. For me you are like editors in a very chaotic web 2.0 environment. I expect you to choose and be able to say, from all those tens of player we think these 5 you should keep an eye on.
Thanks
Avi Charkham
Avi .. thanks for the coverage .. Oyogi will be re-debuting soon ..
A new answer service in the paid category that shows some promise is http://www.simplyanswer.com/
Another Q&A site is GirlsAskGuys.com they are also on guysaskgirls.com. Unlike some it focuses mostly on relationships and differences between genders though.
We run the site www.helpshare.com which, in the past has provided reward based ($) Q&A. We have shifted our direction and are now providing Q&A services to other online properties, so they can get the benefits of Q&A without having to build it themselves. We offer a fully-branded version of HelpShare ($ or points rewards) that supports whatever community exists.
We have also launched Facebook Answers, which provides Q&A within the Facebook community. Check it out here http://apps.facebook.com/helpshare/ (you will need a Facebook user account).
I'm slightly offended that FunAdvice wasn't higher in the list.
Fact: we're over 4 years old.
Fact: we're bigger than all but Yahoo Answers, Answerbag, and Askville.
Fact: we are the ONLY Q&A service that pays users.
We also have photo sharing, tagging, etc, a host of other features that don't exist elsewhere in the category? Seriously, you need help on doing your research. We're by far one of the largest sites in the Q&A space - in June, we received over 500K unique visitors.
How did you miss us?
Josh
Thanks for including Minti's Q&A area.
It is only a small part of Minti, but a very popular part :)
Clay
I'd like to add Vizu and Vizu Answers to this list.
Vizu is a polling-widget (used by the likes of Second Life to Organic to Cozi) that lets you create a free web poll and put it on your blog, MySpace, Facebook or other social page. It's easy, can include images and is customizable to match the theme of your page or site.
http://www.vizu.com/index.html
Vizu Answers (our paid service) allows anyone to conduct do-it-yourself market research by combining an easy-to-use polling platform with a network of diverse websites.
http://answers.vizu.com/market-research.htm
Thanks for compiling the list. All the best.
-AJ
A.J. Kohn
Director of Marketing
Vizu
I think human power in Wikia.org, Mahalo.com InfoCream.com and ChaCha.com will provide some interesting options as they scale up. I think Google knows that search data by itself will become a commodity.
Nice list. I'll make this short. Here's another link you might want to check out - http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=answer+sites
I just scanned through the comments, so if I duplicating, mea culpa.
Yahoo!Answers is great, I've been using them for quite some time now.
My current beef with them right now, though, is that the Travel sections, specifically the Lebanon and South Africa subsections (among others) are being overrun with completely off-topic "chatty" posts.
This is an issue, to me at least, because it means that people with legitimate questions about traveling or moving to those places have their answers wiped off the front page in a matter of moments -- thereby completely rendering the entire concept pointless.
Yahoo!'s answer to this: just report each post. Sigh...
I want to mention one more left off of this very thorough page. Mosio is a mobile Q&A community that enables users to text any question from their phone and have it answered by real people.
From the site...
Ask Mosio to:
* Settle a bet at the bar.
* Get helpful info about restaurants, shops, products or services.
* Answer literally any question: fact, fiction or straight up silly.
* Ask Mosio anything!
http://www.mosio.com
MatAnswers is launched recently and has a very good-looking interface and design.
The most easy to use QA site i've ever been to.
This site has a great time ahead.
MatAnswers is launched recently and has a very good-looking interface and design.
The most easy to use QA site i've ever been to.
This site has a great time ahead.