The Great Q&A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014 (Aardvark, Hunch, StackOverflow, and Quora)
blog.adamsmith.cc
blog.adamsmith.cc
The thing with Q&A is that Q&A is a commodity, a user doesn't care if the answer comes from Quora, Stackoverflow, or Hunch. All they care about is getting the answer after typing their question into Google.
The Q&A wars have already passed and the winner is Yahoo Answers. They dominate the results for most Q&A related questions.
Q&A traffic is 90% search engine. And search engines love older sites and Yahoo has a 5 year head start in ranking, a PR of 8, MILLIONS of active users and billions of pages.
I mean seriously, the Q&A market right now, is all about picking up scraps that Yahoo left over.
And I say that as someone who runs a Q&A site.
Yes, Yahoo has tons of traffic, but 1) they're already being overtaken by answers.com 2) SO identifies Software as being underserved by existing solutions. Software is a 400 Billion dollar industry. Who knows how many other industries aren't being served by Yahoo Answers.
The author is right, we're at the model T era in terms of technology. Relying on Google to find the appropriate question is a good short term tactic, but will be beaten in the long run by other approaches, and doesn't work now outside of the consumer internet. Areas underserved now: B2B anything, corporate tech support (because they don't get much google juice), technical but non-web 2.0 areas like law, accounting, medicine.
Simple upvotes will eventually succumb to the slashdot/reddit phenomenon. Upvotes don't matter when popularity is not a good indicator for the answer you're trying to find. Think music preferences. "What music should I listen to?" is a terrible question for anything based on upvoting. A better system would take into account knowledge about the user, or knowledge about people with similar tastes to the user.
2. StackOverflow works for programmers, but like Joel and Jeff say, 90% of their traffic also comes from Google.
3. The reason Stack Overflow worked because they were able to bring in their communties from the start. Sure a stackoverflow for law would be nice...but good luck finding thousands of lawyers to give their advice away for free.
4. Yes technology sucks....but Google and users care little about technology...for Q&A 90% of traffic is Google...if you haven't hit that statistic yet, you must have a very new site. Google IS Q&A, to dismiss them is suicide.
5. Here is the thing...users just don't care. They don't care if the top answer was upvoted by 20 people, or if a magic unicorn decreed that it's the top answer. They just want the answer. Even if the site is nothing but pure text, as long as the answer is what the person was looking for, they are happy
You're absolutely right to focus on whether the user gets the right answer or not. They don't care about technology. My point is that there is a huge untapped market that can't be served by YA or SO, for technology reasons.
It's also worth noting there are a number of other large incumbents like WikiAnswers (which is now bigger than Yahoo Answers by some accounts), Answerbag, and Yedda, to name a few.
I agree that there is a movement of next-gen Q&A companies going for something special (because I'm one of them), and I know it's a complex field of companies to navigate. But I'd be careful not to oversimplify the pool "major players" to just the few companies playing silicon valley publicity game. The actual Q&A space is much more vast.
Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Fluther.
- We've been using real-time interaction also for years, and more recently added IM notification and chat (not saying I don't think parts of Quora's interface is slick, just we were doing it first).
- We have similarly distinguished backers and advisors: http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/24/fluther-raises-600k-from-to...
- We have a large, thriving community and a healthy amount of traffic (around 800k uniques).
- And at the end of the day, we have a lot of smart people giving great answers. Try asking a good question good question.
- Having talked at length with some of the other co-founders, ceos, and investors of these very companies (and others not on the list), I can say pretty confidently, that we are indeed, "in the fray"
Not trying to sound defensive. I love how our company how's grown, where we're going (we have some amazing stuff in store for this year). More I'm saying how it can be frustrating to not get included in discussions like this (which can shape opinion over time) that are written by people who don't actually have serious insight about the space.
Quite frankly, we're a lot more in the "in-crowd" than some of the other Q&A companies, but I don't think that makes them irrelevant.
I'm curious about your use of Google custom search, especially given your size. You don't think something more tailored would work better?
All in all, looks like a friendly community, which is no easy feat at scale.
Yeah, something tailored would definitely be better. Google custom search is pretty weak, but it gets the job done for our users until we find the time to improve. We'll probably switch to lucene or solr (with some secret sauce), but we've been too busy with other stuff. I set up a branch with Haystack (we use Django) a few weeks ago and was pretty impressed.
If you want to chat more specifically about search (or something else), you can drop me a line: ben@fluther.com
I put in product+brands I've purchased and feel comfortable answering basic "shopping" questions about: iPhone, macbook pro, apple, vizio, volkswagen, jaguar, french connection, ipod, linksys,etc.
Someone comes in and asks a question just like aardvark such as: "What iPhone should I buy? 16gb or 32gb?" "Did your linksys router give you problems?" It sends me or someone else that has purchased that brand/product the question and I give them some practical advice.
Attach affiliate links at the bottom (not sure how you'd do that yet but it's doable).
If you're making this, please let me beta test.
granted they don't have the exact formula you described, but they seem to be heading in that direction
I would love to have the author elaborate on why a small remote team is a bad thing.
Edit: also, FWIW, the product they are seeking funding for is StackExchange, which is built by 3 FogCreek employees who all work at the FogCreek offices in NYC.
I'm biased because I'm the co-founder of YouSaidIt. We provide niche Q&A sites... but with a big difference. We focus on expert Q&A as well as the community. Our Q&A is more like a "town hall" or "expert roundtable". At one site, The Stranger (Seattle's biggest alt weekly) we have had the Mayor answering questions, Dan Savage giving advice, Paul Constant giving personal book recommendations, and candidates running for office.
We haven't even begun to see the places where Q&A will go.
Hunch is basically a diagnostic type site. So you say you want a computer...and it gives you 20 questions with each question narrowing down your solution. Do you want a laptop or netbook? Do you want it in black or red or blue? etc.
Quora is basically a regular Q&A site mixed with twitter and Facebook. So you can follow a topic or a question etc. Personally I found it a bit confusing.
Au contraire, Aardvark was built so you wouldn't have to spam your friends. Each user of Aardvark puts his field of expertise in his settings and only receive questions Aardvark AI thinks a user can answer and it gets better with time. It's really brilliant, and it doesn't ask your friends only, it asks anyone in the community that may be able to answer your question. It's a fast way (by IM, twitter, email etc ) to ask and get answers without bothering people who don't know anything about your question.
Disclaimer: I don't work neither for Vark nor for Google. But I think it's a great service.
If I say I'm an expert on "linux", that could mean linux kernel code, the LAMP stack, or administration and then I get questions like "why do I not get sound out of my netbook on Ubuntu 9.10?"
Me too, but then I replaced 'software engineering' with the language I really know and I now I can answer most questions I get.