Rumble Rumble: Aardvark vs. Quora vs. Facbeook Answers vs. Yahoo Answers

I hurriedly posted about facebook’s launch of questions earlier this week and thought it was time I took it and its competitors for a test drive.  So two questions, four sites, here we go!

In selecting questions, I used several criteria, (1) a question that is tough to google (2) something I would actually ask in real life .  I settled on one local knowledge question and one more techy question, and a summary of my experience is below:

Best– Aardvark was still by far the best for my purposes.  Quick responses from people who are passionate about answering, best experience hands down.

OK for other purposes– Admittedly, this test did not play to Quora‘s strengths.  Quora’s strengths are for questions that foster more intellectual discourse than the questions I posted, so while it didn’t work perfectly for this response, it still seems to have a critical mass of responders with good quality responses.

Bad, but likely to improve– Facebook also rendered poor results, primarily because low response time and low quantity of answers– a problem likely to be solved as the feature rolls out site-wide and as people grow more accustomed to participating.

Worst– I’m not sure if it has to do with Yahoo Answers incentive system, but people tended to answer just for the sake of answering, without adding value to previous answers and without focusing on quality.

Generally speaking, I think that Q&A is a great improvement and enhancement to traditional search. As the web becomes increasingly crowded with junk and paid content, we turn more and more to trusted sources– enthusiasts (aardvark), friends (facebook), experts (quora). Though Facebook was weak this time around, its entrance in the space is critical in launching user-generated Q&A into the mainstream. Automatically involving their base of 500M active users will undoubtedly make participation in social search much more common and improve the experience for everyone.