Yahoo Answers

What we liked:
Yahoo has put a lot of time and effort into this community area and it's come up with a site that's slick, simple to use and packed with people ready to give you answers.

It was easily the best designed of all the sites we looked at.The front page is dominated by three big buttons, which makes it easy to ask a question, answer an existing one, or browse through those that have already been dealt with. To get started, you just need a Yahoo registration (if you have one of its email accounts, you'll have this already). You can then post up to six questions per day.

The site is built on a points system that has been followed by sites such as Live QnA. Every time you post a question, it costs you points. Every time you answer one, you earn some. As your points go up, so does your ranking, which lets you access extra features on the site (such as the ability to ask more questions per day).

This ranking system creates competition on the site, making regular users particularly keen to answer your question as soon and as expertly as possible. It can also be habit-forming, as you'll see on the leaderboards, which show that some top posters have added more than 50,000 answers (http://tinyurl.com/ewdk8)

With all this potential expertise, you can expect a swift reply no matter what you ask and all of our queries received illuminating responses. For our quest to make it into the Guinness Book of Records, it was pointed out that we could come up with our own record rather than breaking an existing one; while our pondering on the salinity of the sea was rewarded with several pages of discussion on the subject.

Yahoo Answers was also the only place where we got a correct answer to our film question. (Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole share the dubious honour, with seven nominations each.)

Browsing other questions is fun thanks to the ease of navigation. Members are encouraged to vote on the quality of answers, and any that don't make the grade are hidden by default.

Finally,if you've got a question that needs the local touch, scroll down to the bottom of the page. There you'll find a link to a UK version of the site.

How can it be improved:
Yahoo Answers relies on its members' desire to collect points. This usually works fine, but it does tempt people into leaving useless answers (such as 'I don't know') to questions in order to gain points.

Reviewed: Issue 151 (18 December 2006 - 3 January 2007)