Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

It’s that time again… here are the product updates we made today:Fairer voting rule
Many of you have suggested that to make it fair for everyone, you should not be able to vote for your own answers. We’ve made this update, and hopefully it will help put everyone on a level playing field.

Search-ahead improvements
By now most of you know that when you start typing in a question , you’re shown similar questions that were asked before. If you see that someone else has asked the same question, you can save the trouble and points of asking it yourself. In this update, we’ve improved the search algorithm to make the results more relevant (see screenshot).

New rules to improve content quality
As you know, we’re always working to improve the content quality of Answers, and dissuade abuses that take away the impact of the good Q&As YOU work hard to write. So in this update, we created two new rules to help keep clean and useful information in, and trollers out.

Two-point deduction for user deletions
Now, when you delete your own answer, two points will be taken away. This is to make it less attractive for people who write junk answers, delete them, and avoid a violation while maintaining their point gain.

Two-point deduction for all violations
I think most of you agree that it shouldn’t pay to abuse Yahoo! Answers. Now, if your question or answer is deleted for a violation of community guidelines, you will lose two points.

As always, we’d like to know what you think of these changes.

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team