Stack Exchange CEO: "Nobody Wants To Find Yahoo Answers In Their Search Results"
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
1) Question with answer. 2) Question with no answer. 3) Question with answer, but answer was poor/incomplete/wrong/lacking. 4) Different Question than what I was searching for (irrelevant if answered).
I'd argue the issue is with search results, not always Yahoo Answers. #1 should always appear in search results. #2-3-4 never should. #2 should be easy to filter out. #3 and #4, that's the tough part. Maybe they can appear in search results, but not page one.
Every time you run into #2-3-4, you waste the users time (scarce resource). The more you do this, the greater resentment users have towards Yahoo Answers/Google. If #2-3-4 are occurring ~50% of the time, that's a lot waste. If it's in the 10-20% range, annoying, but not terrible. Less than that and you're doing a "good" job.
The responsibility falls on the shoulders of Yahoo, but also Google:
- If Yahoo reduces #3, search results will be less polluted.
- Stack Exchange does a better job with #3. Their community/insentive-system works.
- Google needs algorithms to eliminate/reduce #2-3-4.
If Google can't do that, they should measure how much time Yahoo Answer's wastes of their users. If it's large, consider de-indexing YA, but that's a nuclear step.
I think it's safe to agree that, as a collective, Stack Exchange has "better" answers than Yahoo, but users don't feel the averages when searching via Google. An answer is an answer, regardless of where it comes from. Google's job should be to present #1 and filter out #2-3-4. YA's/SE's job should be to eliminate #3, and their reward for doing so will mean more satisfied traffic from Google.
In both cases, it's nice that I'm never the first to want a particular question answered.
http://www.google.com/search?q=where+to+go+to+watch+planes+t...
Google maps:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
BTW, if you like to watch planes take off and land, the Palo Alto airport is another good spot. It's all small prop-driven private planes, so the noise level is quite a bit less than at SFO. And there're some great marsh trails at the end of Embarcadero with benches that are right under the flight path, so planes fly straight over you at an altitude of maybe 50-100 feet:
The real danger is that the site is used buy a lot of young people who will consistently walk away with a completely skewed and incorrect notion of the subject they are asking about.
As they say: "Be the change you want to see around you".
Much more effective would be to advance the cause of workable communities or products while starving out the page views of ones beyond repair.
And Gandhi never added qualifiers to his statement. As a matter of fact, the more broken a system is, the more it needs good people to step up and affect change.
Suffice it to say I now avoid Yahoo answers as well.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Aj_AlHhmSE3TfJp...
Best answer, chosen by voters begins with: "I dont know the answer to your question."
The rest are a bunch of random guesses by people who don't really know anything about the topic. That's actually exactly the sort of thread I am disappointed to find when I ask a question like that. I could just ask the nearest person or call my mother and get more or less the same results. Honestly, if I spent 30 seconds brainstorming I would probably come up with at least half of that list of answers. I'd turn to the web for slightly more detail and authority, which isn't in evidence there at all.
That being said, I have been surprised at the number of times I've found relevant answers. It's more often than I expect, even if it's not as often as I'd like, and I do find the quality of Yahoo Answers to be less consistent than Stack Exchange,
Teenage chat? Seriously?
(It just occurred to me that someday I may come to regret all my HN comments. Gulp. Ah well, it's been fun so far.)
Even subjective commentary needs to provide context, if it's meant to be useful.
Take the case with Joel (or at least the headline): Joel is saying, basically, "Yahoo Answers suck". It misses context: why does it suck? Does it always suck? Apparently it doesn't always, given that most upvoted comment here is PG giving a reasonable counter-example.
The thing is, objective statements are boring and don't make the headlines. If Joel went to an interview only to say "Gee-whiz, actually SO is doing well because we managed to provide a decent alternative to EE, but for non-programming topics people are still being served by more established players like Yahoo Answers.", there would be no headline for Techcrunch, and we wouldn't be wasting our time discussing about this.
I've always liked Joel's observation of Usenet nit-picking culture and how it's likely related to easy quoting.
I haven't followed discussion about StackExchange site creation and user acquisition models, but I think that Joel's practical, organic approach is good. Although there isn't StackExchange for medical professionals yet, if the growth rates are what they claim, it might be that in the near future there are enough doctors participating in cooking, photography and all the other SE sites, that medical SE site will emerge.
Interesting interview overall I guess but his comments on this subject really annoyed me for some reason.
(Unfortunately, I never did find a good description of the algorithm.)
I think I'd probably add TC to a google site ban list if I used google search. The difference between the AOL way and a content farm seems to be about ~30 minutes of effort per piece.
For non-tech questions, I encounter many of the other mee-too q&a sites, and they usually yield someone (probably scraped from other sites) asking the question, with no answer. This has been happening with alarming frequency which to me, puts the ball in google's court.
Fixya.com, for example came up as unanswered questions in enough car/DIY searches for me recently that as soon as I saw the google blacklist feature I added them from memory.
I remember when Yahoo! Answers came out it was actually pretty cool. I participated for a while and had fun. Has it deteriorated so much since? And why should other answer services fare better?
Btw, there are a lot of really low quality answers on Stack Overflow, too.
Why do universities cost more than community colleges? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AukI2XODG.mO_QE...
It's just a question, picked from the front page.
It's a legitimate inquiry. I don't see a "what do penguins eat?"
More important question is what is Joel Smoking? What are his investors smoking? To let him make such off the wall assumptions.
I have found a lot of useful answers on yahoo answers on a range and depth of topics that do not exist within SE sites.