I just tried using Yahoo! Answers for the first time this afternoon.
We BarCampers were trying to find a place nearby to donate the leftover food from the weekend, and I did several unsuccessful searches on both Yahoo! and Google (terms like “homeless shelter downtown los angeles,” “foodbank downtown los angeles,” etc). So, I turned to our new knowledge search product, Yahoo! Answers – posting the question “where can I donte food in downtown LA?” (yes, I misspelled ‘donate’) in the “Community Service” category.
I was pretty psyched when the first answer came back in minutes. But as you can see here, the 3 answers I have gotten back so far were utterly unhelpful and somewhat snarky (though, surprisingly, no one mocked my typo). But I know that’s the cost of doing business here in Web2.0, so it’s not the responses that I want to rant about.
What upset me was that there was no mechanism for granular reputation feedback, which I believe to be essential to any community-generated intelligence. Instead what you have are the very binary options “Choose As Best Answer” and “Report Abuse.” Come on guys! What about the very simple (and already available elsewhere on Yahoo!) “Was this helpful to you?” Without a mechanism for this kind of more granular feedback, Yahoo! Answers will have issues elevating the signal to noise ratio.