Live QnA

What we liked:
Microsoft's Live QnA provided excellent answers to our spyware question, with plenty of useful links to free downloads.

The replies to our other queries were more of a mixed bag, but the site is geared mainly towards computing and technology issues, so it's little surprise that this is where the best results were found.

You can ask as many questions as you like, although you're limited to no more than five in quick succession. The interface will be familiar to anyone who's ever glanced at an Office program. It's clean, simple and quick to navigate. There's no registration process, so you're up and running as soon as you visit the site.

However, this is still a beta phase project, and it shows. But although Live QnA feels a bit rough around the edges, it has attracted a healthy audience, which means you can be confident of getting a quick answer to your question. That nippiness is helped by the site's ranking system, which rewards users with points for answering questions - as well as extra points if those answers are particularly good. It's a system that clearly works. Five points are awarded for responding to a query. When we visited, the top user had a score of more than 40,000.

How it could be improved:
There was only a single answer to our film question - and it was wrong. Our football question went unanswered, probably because of the predominantly Stateside audience. We also found that once questions dropped off the 'recently asked' list, they tended not to garner further responses.

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