Tags: Microsoft

Yahoo launches its own Answers Service

Yahoo! has finally launched its own Answer service in competition to an existing feature from its prime rival Google. Google has their Google Answers working since a long time now and has been pretty successful for their users. Yahoo! on their part plans to add a human touch to their own Yahoo! Answers as the questions asked on this forum are answered for free by other community members.

In comparison, Google uses expert’s services to answer the questions on their Google Answers and this makes the service not free for the end user. The latest attempt to add a new feature to its already wide range of services is Yahoo’s attempt at tapping into a community’s collective knowledge to dig out information.

The search engine company is relying on the participation from their web-based users to collaborate and create something nice, which helps the other community members to get answers to their questions. And the more time the users stay on these sub-sites of the company, the more chances they have to earn through online advertisement based revenues.

There are many more similar websites providing similar facility for the generic web users. However, Yahoo! has the advantage of having a very large number of user base, which won’t require to register for this value added offering to their account. It would be interesting to see how Yahoo! keeps on innovating on this new service to counter the competition from rivals like Google and Wondir.com.

And it would interesting to see how soon Microsoft also decides to launch their own MSN based Answers service! We are really getting tired of seeing these companies doing replications of each other’s products and not being innovative enough.