Question: How Many Q&A Services Does the Web Need?

July 27, 2010 at 4:00 am PT

You can see why an ambitious engineer or venture capitalist would be interested in a Q&A service: They’re very hot right now!

Old fogies like Yahoo (YHOO) and Answers.com have been at this for a while. But in the past 12 months or so, everyone wants in.

Google (GOOG) bought Aardvark earlier this year, and Facebook is working on its own flavor of so-called “social search” (which means that human beings ask questions, and other human beings answer them). Start-up-of-the-moment Quora was supposedly valued at $86 million before it ever opened its doors. Etc.

Okay. But why is Ask.com adding a questions feature to its offering?

Easy: Because it’s tried everything else, and there’s no reason not to. IAC’s (IACI) search unit has had less than five percent of the domestic market for a very long time, even though it has gone through multiple CEOs, tech overhauls and branding campaigns.

Don’t want to be reflexively negative here (really!). So best to say that if this gambit moves the needle, it will be a pleasant surprise.

Tagged with: Aardvark, advertising, Answers.com, Ask.com, Google, IAC, Internet, MediaMemo, Peter Kafka, questions and answers, Quora, search, Yahoo

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http://replyz.com Replyz

Hi Peter – Very true, there’s a lot of me-too going around in the Q&A space. After a decade in the Q&A space, we watched it go from a non-space to perhaps overexposed in just a few years. This year, we wanted to try something novel and needed, so we came out with Replyz.com, which lets anyone see the questions people are asking on Twitter and respond to them. Thus, in a sense, rather than starting another Q&A site, we’re making Twitter into the Q&A site that it’s always had the potential to be. Hope that’s of some interest to you as you keep an eye on the space.