Sunday, April 30, 2006

I have to rant a little about this new product Yahoo! is promoting the heck out of on their frontpage... Yahoo! Answers. Why would I ever use this? If I want to know about something, I SEARCH for it. SEARCHing for it is pretty simple: you type in a keyword you get results. With Y! Answers there are at least two more steps to complete to get an answer! And then it's from a human being...!?? This probably sounds ironic but I trust a search engine more than a human because the human could be an idiot while I know the engine is just an engine. With the engine I have more control to decipher the results, with the human I'm taking my chances.

Before I left in 2001 there was Y! Experts and this looks like a revision of that same product. Dude, Y! Experts sucked. You know why? You had to trust that the human on the other side knew what they were talking about. Why not browse search results and decide for yourself whether the links are trustworthy or not - a much quicker proces.

I would LOVE to see the stats on this product and get a sense of how it's doing. I'm really at a loss as to why Yahoo! would be promoting it so heavily. If anybody has had a good experience with this product please let me know.

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