Nearly five months after its debut, the Yahoo Answers service picked up its 10 millionth answer posted to the service.
Yahoo has combined social media and celebrity to make its new Yahoo Answers service a success. Only a few short months after its debut, the service saw its 10 millionth answer posted online.
The Yahoo Answers team posted the news and a number of other points about the service. Within Yahoo search, certain queries will retrieve solutions added by users to Yahoo Answers, for example.
At the bottom of Yahoo Search pages, the company has placed a link to Answers. “Didn’t find what you needed?” it reads next to that link. Yahoo Tech also contains a tab to send users to Answers for posts related to the query.
Yahoo Answers also gained a place among Firefox’s search engine options, so those users can query Answers directly.
The service also featured some celebrity answer-seekers. Deepak Chopra asked “What do you think the role of individual transformation is in manifesting world peace?” while new parent Donald Trump sought advice from parents: “What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given on raising a child?”
The Answers team cited the rise of social search products in a number of Asian countries as the beginning of a shift from purely algorithmic search results to those augmented by personal knowledge. Yahoo has spent millions in bulking up its various social media offerings; Flickr, Del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, and Webjay represent those among others.
Yahoo’s CFO Susan Decker earned some unwanted celebrity by saying the company is fine being second place in search behind Google. However, they are still competing in search, but instead of trying to go toe-to-toe with Google, they’ll tap their userbase to improve search results.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
