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Yahoo! Answers the call for Help

Today Yahoo! launched a new free beta service called Yahoo! Answers. The service allows anyone to ask a question and receive free answers from anyone who feels like sharing information. People can review all answers and vote on the best answer. This service sounds like it could be valuable for doing research on almost any topic but when you scratch a little under the surface there are some big open questions for Yahoo! to answer.

How do people know if the answers are valid? Who will find this service really useful? Will experts on hundreds or thousands of subjects join in to provide help? I have my doubts that the experts that already provide free answers on the message boards and forums will start using this service actively until they see the adoption curve jump. (and their fans move away from the boards and forums) They’ve already established a reputation on other sites with hundreds and thousands of posts already created full of answers. To start from scratch answering the same questions again will be frustrating for many. Making matters worse, can you imagine how frustrating it will be for someone to see other people paid for answers that may have come from a free answer they provided on another site. This is going to be interesting to watch.

So, back to the issue of validity.  Whose answer should you trust? I suppose one option would be an e-bay style rating system for answerers. The Yahoo service does allow people to vote on answers with the idea that the best one will rank higher. There is some scoring for providing 'best answers' to increase a person's credibility though points. I think this process has two significant flaws. 1. the best answer may not be all that helpful as there probably won’t be one answer that addresses the needs of each person. Most likely, many answers will have useful bits of information. 2. using activity points as a key scoring element could quickly swamp 'best answer' points. So the scoring system will be useful for tracking active responders but experts on a single topic who don't answer frequently, might be perceived as less knowledgeable if their point rank is low.

One critical aspect of developing a question answering system is to make sure it’s useful to most people most of the time rather than being perceived as a playground to try once and leave behind. It's very hard to create a solution that provides good answers across a wide variety of domains.. Cymfony developed an award winning question-answering technology in the late 90’s that was intended to do this. The idea was that anyone could enter a question in their favorite search engine-style interface and have Cymfony’s Question Answering engine look for information across the web that would answer the question. Rather than just matching on terms used in the question, Cymfony’s system analyzed the sentence structure and context of the question against the millions of potential matches across the web. The engine could differentiate between a person, place or thing understanding contextual information such as time in order to find applicable answers to questions.

So if you asked a question such as: Where will the next World Cup be held? The answer would be a list of web posts showing snippets of the exact answer highlighted. Sounds pretty cool. It was. Cymfony received many accolades from researchers all over the world and from consumer beta testers who were very forgiving about accuracy for free services. But when we tested the concept with business people who expected highly accurate comprehensive answers to business questions about competitors and potential investments, the value dropped dramatically because the business people still had to sift through multiple snippets to piece together the whole story. That’s why we evolved our engine and integrated it into an application platform called Orchestra to deliver highly valuable business insight and accurate information on companies, people, competitors, industries and trends. We tune Orchestra for each client to achieve deliver accurate intelligence for their market.

I believe that Yahoo! Answers and many other question answering solutions (see Search Engine Watch for more) may run into many of the same problems that Cymfony ran into years ago even though our technology approaches are very different. But the folks at Yahoo! are pretty smart so I’m sure they’ve thought through many of these issues and will have some good enhancements coming out soon. If they can find a way to aggregate information across the answers rather than relying on single ‘best answers’ and develop some kind of accuracy ranking process that would be really cool.

Posted by Julie Woods on December 8, 2005 at 06:32 PM | Email this post Permalink

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