

The Great Q&A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014 (Aardvark, Hunch, StackOverflow, and Quora) - adamsmith
http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2010/02/the-great-qa-wars-of-2009-2014.html

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vaksel
I always laugh when people bring up Quora as if they already won. They haven't
even launched yet.

The thing with Q&A is that Q&A is a commodity, a user doesn't care if the
answer comes from Quora, Stackoverflow, or Hunch. All they care about is
getting the answer after typing their question into Google.

The Q&A wars have already passed and the winner is Yahoo Answers. They
dominate the results for most Q&A related questions.

Q&A traffic is 90% search engine. And search engines love older sites and
Yahoo has a 5 year head start in ranking, a PR of 8, MILLIONS of active users
and billions of pages.

I mean seriously, the Q&A market right now, is all about picking up scraps
that Yahoo left over.

And I say that as someone who runs a Q&A site.

~~~
arohner
The Q&A wars haven't even started, and I say that as someone who runs a Q&A
site.

Yes, Yahoo has tons of traffic, but 1) they're already being overtaken by
answers.com 2) SO identifies Software as being underserved by existing
solutions. Software is a 400 Billion dollar industry. Who knows how many other
industries aren't being served by Yahoo Answers.

The author is right, we're at the model T era in terms of technology. Relying
on Google to find the appropriate question is a good short term tactic, but
will be beaten in the long run by other approaches, and doesn't work _now_
outside of the consumer internet. Areas underserved now: B2B anything,
corporate tech support (because they don't get much google juice), technical
but non-web 2.0 areas like law, accounting, medicine.

Simple upvotes will eventually succumb to the slashdot/reddit phenomenon.
Upvotes don't matter when popularity is not a good indicator for the answer
you're trying to find. Think music preferences. "What music should I listen
to?" is a terrible question for anything based on upvoting. A better system
would take into account knowledge about the user, or knowledge about people
with similar tastes to the user.

~~~
vaksel
1\. answers.com is another juggernaut from years ago. It was launched in 1999,
but was rebranded in 2005. So giving them as an example doesn't work.

2\. StackOverflow works for programmers, but like Joel and Jeff say, 90% of
their traffic also comes from Google.

3\. The reason Stack Overflow worked because they were able to bring in their
communties from the start. Sure a stackoverflow for law would be nice...but
good luck finding thousands of lawyers to give their advice away for free.

4\. Yes technology sucks....but Google and users care little about
technology...for Q&A 90% of traffic is Google...if you haven't hit that
statistic yet, you must have a very new site. Google IS Q&A, to dismiss them
is suicide.

5\. Here is the thing...users just don't care. They don't care if the top
answer was upvoted by 20 people, or if a magic unicorn decreed that it's the
top answer. They just want the answer. Even if the site is nothing but pure
text, as long as the answer is what the person was looking for, they are happy

~~~
arohner
There's more to Q&A than just the consumer internet. There's the things people
find on Yahoo Answers today, and then there's everything people want answers
for, whether Yahoo Answers has a category for it or not. The second is an
order of magnitude larger than any site out there right now.

You're absolutely right to focus on whether the user gets the right answer or
not. They don't care about technology. My point is that there is a _huge_
untapped market that can't be served by YA or SO, for technology reasons.

------
jobenjo
I agree with you about the Q&A wars shaping up, but I think you should include
Fluther, which falls smack dab in the middle of this fray.

It's also worth noting there are a number of other large incumbents like
WikiAnswers (which is now bigger than Yahoo Answers by some accounts),
Answerbag, and Yedda, to name a few.

I agree that there is a movement of next-gen Q&A companies going for something
special (because I'm one of them), and I know it's a complex field of
companies to navigate. But I'd be careful not to oversimplify the pool "major
players" to just the few companies playing silicon valley publicity game. The
actual Q&A space is much more vast.

Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Fluther.

~~~
jimmybot
Unpack that "middle of this fray"--what differentiates Fluther?

~~~
jobenjo
\- We've been matching questions using an a sophisticated algorithm since
before Aardvark launched.

\- We've been using real-time interaction also for years, and more recently
added IM notification and chat (not saying I don't think parts of Quora's
interface is slick, just we were doing it first).

\- We have similarly distinguished backers and advisors:
[http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/24/fluther-raises-600k-from-
to...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/24/fluther-raises-600k-from-top-valley-
investors-for-crowd-sourced-answers/)

\- We have a large, thriving community and a healthy amount of traffic (around
800k uniques).

\- And at the end of the day, we have a lot of smart people giving great
answers. Try asking a good question good question.

\- Having talked at length with some of the other co-founders, ceos, and
investors of these very companies (and others not on the list), I can say
pretty confidently, that we are indeed, "in the fray"

Not trying to sound defensive. I love how our company how's grown, where we're
going (we have some amazing stuff in store for this year). More I'm saying how
it can be frustrating to not get included in discussions like this (which can
shape opinion over time) that are written by people who don't actually have
serious insight about the space.

Quite frankly, we're a lot more in the "in-crowd" than some of the other Q&A
companies, but I don't think that makes them irrelevant.

~~~
jimmybot
I wasn't trying to sound offensive. Wanted to soft pitch you something easy to
hit because I hadn't heard of Fluther before and as long as you're
disclaiming, it would be helpful to know what you're about.

I'm curious about your use of Google custom search, especially given your
size. You don't think something more tailored would work better?

All in all, looks like a friendly community, which is no easy feat at scale.

~~~
jobenjo
Thanks, jimmybot.

Yeah, something tailored would definitely be better. Google custom search is
pretty weak, but it gets the job done for our users until we find the time to
improve. We'll probably switch to lucene or solr (with some secret sauce), but
we've been too busy with other stuff. I set up a branch with Haystack (we use
Django) a few weeks ago and was pretty impressed.

If you want to chat more specifically about search (or something else), you
can drop me a line: ben@fluther.com

------
jasonlbaptiste
I really really want to see someone do something like Aardvark JUST for
shopping. Here's how it would work:

I put in product+brands I've purchased and feel comfortable answering basic
"shopping" questions about: iPhone, macbook pro, apple, vizio, volkswagen,
jaguar, french connection, ipod, linksys,etc.

Someone comes in and asks a question just like aardvark such as: "What iPhone
should I buy? 16gb or 32gb?" "Did your linksys router give you problems?" It
sends me or someone else that has purchased that brand/product the question
and I give them some practical advice.

Attach affiliate links at the bottom (not sure how you'd do that yet but it's
doable).

If you're making this, please let me beta test.

~~~
vaksel
fairly sure you are describing <http://www.imshopping.com/>

granted they don't have the exact formula you described, but they seem to be
heading in that direction

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
oh awesome. thanks vaksel.

------
portman
_"Furthermore, it seems like “everyone on the SO team works remotely from
home,” and a recent job posting suggests that might continue. I hope not."_

I would love to have the author elaborate on why a small remote team is a bad
thing.

Edit: also, FWIW, the product they are seeking funding for is StackExchange,
which is built by 3 FogCreek employees who all work at the FogCreek offices in
NYC.

~~~
adamsmith
It's not bad; it just doesn't scale. I don't have any direct experience but I
would expect it to start breaking down around 10-20 people.

------
cborwick
Most of the sites being discussed are mega sites, and while they get a lot of
traffic they don't necessarily provide the best answers. The niche Q&A sites
will ultimately become the best of Q&A. Not as high profile, but much better.

I'm biased because I'm the co-founder of YouSaidIt. We provide niche Q&A
sites... but with a big difference. We focus on expert Q&A as well as the
community. Our Q&A is more like a "town hall" or "expert roundtable". At one
site, The Stranger (Seattle's biggest alt weekly) we have had the Mayor
answering questions, Dan Savage giving advice, Paul Constant giving personal
book recommendations, and candidates running for office.

We haven't even begun to see the places where Q&A will go.

------
pibefision
So, when Google buys a company, it creates a market?

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papachito
He forgot <http://shapado.com> my open source stackoverflow =)

~~~
tonystubblebine
Forgot or doesn't really know who the players are in this space other than who
has shown up on TechCrunch? I felt like he left a lot of Q&A sites out.

~~~
_delirium
Mailing lists are sort of a non-startup player too, at least for tech answers.
If I'm googling for a programming question or a Linux configuration issue or
something, I'd estimate I find my answer in mailing list archives at least as
often as on normal websites.

------
AGorilla
WTH are Aardvark, Hunch and Quora?

~~~
vaksel
Aardvark is a SMS Q&A site, you ask a question and it spams your friends with
text messages, tweets etc. They were just bought by Google.

Hunch is basically a diagnostic type site. So you say you want a
computer...and it gives you 20 questions with each question narrowing down
your solution. Do you want a laptop or netbook? Do you want it in black or red
or blue? etc.

Quora is basically a regular Q&A site mixed with twitter and Facebook. So you
can follow a topic or a question etc. Personally I found it a bit confusing.

~~~
papachito
> Aardvark is a SMS Q&A site, you ask a question and it spams your friends
> with text messages, tweets etc. They were just bought by Google.

Au contraire, Aardvark was built so you wouldn't have to spam your friends.
Each user of Aardvark puts his field of expertise in his settings and only
receive questions Aardvark AI thinks a user can answer and it gets better with
time. It's really brilliant, and it doesn't ask your friends only, it asks
anyone in the community that may be able to answer your question. It's a fast
way (by IM, twitter, email etc ) to ask and get answers without bothering
people who don't know anything about your question.

Disclaimer: I don't work neither for Vark nor for Google. But I think it's a
great service.

~~~
adamsmith
You nailed the concept but the execution was soft. They didn't have enough
information on their users to do this well. They knew I was interested in
'wine' and 'software engineering' but didn't understand the huge difference in
expertise I had in each, for example.

~~~
arohner
Exactly. Also, if you're a professional software developer, even your resume
isn't a good description of what you are an expert on, so their one line
description isn't adequate.

If I say I'm an expert on "linux", that could mean linux kernel code, the LAMP
stack, or administration and then I get questions like "why do I not get sound
out of my netbook on Ubuntu 9.10?"

