Top Q&A Sites Reviewed

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."

Comments

Helium

[fishdan]

Helium 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."

My Advice to Net Newbies

[Greyfox]

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...

Re:My Advice to Net Newbies

[Impeesa]

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.

This is pretty close to the best technique, but not quite there. Googling for the question will find you pages with the question. Googling for as much of the answer as you can give works even better. Compare "what is the average rainfall in the amazon basin?" to "the average rainfall in the amazon basin is".

Yahoo! Answers

[Bigbutt]

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]

Learn to use search engines

[Four_One_Nine]

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.

Chacha it?

[Luminus]

I'm not sure why this site is so frequently dismissed or ignored in these sort of polls and collections of answer sites, but I'd recommend it.

Q&A or search?

[DocJohn]

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).

Re:Interesting Timing

[Keruo]

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, 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.