Q&A Sites

WHY?
WHAT?
HOW?

WHY PEOPLE ASK Questions?

  • Information Overload from search engines
  • Info curated by a real person

What do they ask?

  • Questions in natural language
  • Wide ranging topics
    • science and tech
    • religion
    • politics
    • etc

Examples of Q&A SITES

  • AnswerBag - 2003
  • WikiAnswers - 2003
  • Yahoo Answers - 2005
  • Google Q&A - 2007
  • StackOverflow - 2008
  • Quora - 2010

What drives the success?

  • User participation - in form of more Qs and As
  • Quality content
  • Proper filtering/ranking of relevant content


  • StackOverflow - large, and focused community
  • Google Q&A - Incentives for answerers (Google Answers Researchers)
  • Yahoo Answers - Large community and massive content
  • Quora - Smaller community but quality content

Yahoo Answers vs Quora

  • Yahoo Answers leverages Yahoo users and hence a large community
  • But no moderation/filtering of content
  • Quora has moderation
  • Quora's software filters quality content to the top

Result: Quora's community and content both appear to be more sane.

OTHERS?

Reddit
  • People post Qs to discussion forums like Reddit
  • Pretty vast content wise
  • Moderation powered by the community
  • Lacks social integration
  • Pretty minimal UI

Q&A as a learning platform

  • Wide range of subjects
  • Wide range of Q&As within a subject
  • Possible co-relation between different Q&As
  • Can deduce factual dependencies between Q&As
  • Dependencies can aid exploratory learning

q&a-sites

By Ashish Dubey

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