Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

Around 1:30pm on May 7th, almost exactly five months since our Beta launch, someone posted the 10 millionth answer on Yahoo! Answers. While the number of answers is not the only criterion for our success, it is a major milestone attesting to the power of the Answerer community that has built this service with us.

Yahoo! Answers wouldn’t be anything without its community members. Anirudh Koul, broke 10,000 points in the first three weeks and found himself being interviewed by The New York Times about his Answers experience.

Our current points leader, Jane Furrows, is a resident expert on Answers itself, helping out the community with her experience and wisdom.

You may have also noticed that the community of Answerers is truly international. To find local versions of the Yahoo! Answers community in other English-speaking countries, go to our sites in USA, Canada, Australia, and India.

You’ll soon see Spanish, German and French support for Answers as well. As automatic language translation services such as Babelfish improve, one day you’ll be able to ask a question about the Ming empire and get Chinese answers from college students in Beijing translated into your language.

You may notice that the “Beta” tag has been removed from the Answers logo. This does NOT mean we consider this product finished. Not at all! It actually means we will measure ourselves against an even higher standard.

In the next few months, you’re going to see product updates that will improve abuse filtering, make it easier to find the right answerers for your question, and a ratings and reputation system that will reward high quality questions and answers.

As always, don’t hesitate to tell us what you would like to see next. As many of you can attest, a number of our best features came directly from your suggestions!

Lastly, we’d like to welcome back an old friend, someone that exemplifies the spirit of Yahoo! Answers. The Yahoo! Answers Hamster, or the Yamster, is the everyday critter who through spunk and wit achieves great things with all the fellow Yamsters!

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

You may have noticed that Yahoo! Answers attracts questions and answers from around the globe. This is great in that it allows us to share knowledge on a global scale, but there are times when you just want to see content more relevant to the UK and Ireland.

So, where do you start to find this content?

There are currently ten sub-categories focusing specifically on UK and Irish content:

Travel ›› United Kingdom

Travel ›› Ireland
Dining Out ›› United Kingdom

Dining Out ›› Ireland
Local Businesses ›› United Kingdom

Local Businesses ›› Ireland
Business & Finance ›› Taxes ›› United Kingdom

Business & Finance ›› Taxes ›› Ireland
Sports ›› Football (Soccer) ›› English Football (Soccer)

Sports ›› Football (Soccer) ›› Scottish Football (Soccer)

In addition to these categories, we find the best way to locate UK and Irish content is to use the search feature. The regular search bar is useful for quick searches, but if you want to really locate specific content, advanced search is what you need.

Try searching for `UK`, `Ireland`, `Scotland`, `Wales`, or try specific areas such as `Yorkshire` `Dublin`, or `Edinburgh`. You will be pleasantly surprised by the number of results returned and the chances are you will find questions you can answer.

Getting too many results? Try filtering the search further by using these advanced search features:

• Perhaps you want only open questions that are less than 7 days old, or older than 3 months. The Date Submitted drop-down menu lets you select several different time periods, including the two mentioned above.
• Looking for particular askers questions? Select the “Nicknames of Askers” in the radio button for keyword match and all results from that particular asker will be displayed
• Are you looking for just open questions to answer, undecided questions to vote on, or resolved questions to increase your knowledge base? In the Question Status field you can screen for any one of these, or select the “All” radio button and look at every question available.
• Did you do a search on “blackberry” expecting pie recipes, and end up getting questions about mobile phone devices? You can use the Category field drop-down menu to select which category you want to search. Never again will you be looking for a good dessert recipe and end up with downloadable email help.

So, looking for recent, open questions on Dublin? Make sure you put the radio button in “open questions”, choose “within 7 days” from the drop down, and here are your open questions on Dublin. Finding questions couldn’t be easier!

Finally, check out our daily featured questions on the Yahoo! Answers UK & Ireland homepage. We always try to feature questions on here that are relevant to our UK and Ireland participants.

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

Believe it or not, London isn’t always rainy and foggy.  Indeed right now spring is in the air and tourists are starting to flood into London, giving it that special buzz and liveliness.

As a tourist to this great city where do you start, and what should you see?  These are some of the questions we come across on Answers in the Travel»UK»London category.  Fortunately we have some excellent answerers ready to help you out.

Here are our picks of some London-based questions:

What is London like to live in?  

What can I do in London on a small budget?

Where are the best places to visit in London?

What are some alternative attractions in London?

Where is the coolest place to hang out in London?

Where can I eat great veggie food in Central London?

Are there any good books about London?

If you have further questions, Yahoo! Answers is here to help you out, so just fire away!

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

As Yahoo! Answers’ audience has become global, you’ve been asking for versions that have a local voice—your country, your culture. Well, we’ve responded. You might already know that  there are ten Yahoo! Answers sites around the world—that means three billion people have Yahoo! Answers for their own countries.

Now, the sites themselves have local voices. Many of the world’s Answers Teams have started their own blogs, and they’d love for you to check them out:

Yahoo! Answers India: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_answrs_team_in
Yahoo! Answers USA: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_answrs_team
Yahoo! Answers Australia/New Zealand: http://au.blog.360.yahoo.com/y_answrs_team_au
Yahoo! Answers Canada: http://ca.blog.360.yahoo.com/y_answrs_team_can

We’d also like to invite you to check out the international Yahoo! Answers sites themselves:

English-language:

• U.S.A.: http://answers.yahoo.com
• India: http://in.answers.yahoo.com
• UK/Ireland: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com
• Australia/New Zealand: http://au.answers.yahoo.com
• Canada: http://ca.answers.yahoo.com

Chinese:

• China: http://ks.cn.yahoo.com
• Taiwan: http://tw.knowledge.yahoo.com
• Hong Kong: http://hk.knowledge.yahoo.com

Japanese: http://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp

Korean: http://kr.ks.yahoo.com/index.html

Curious about these gold mines of information, but don’t speak their languages?  You can dig in with the Yahoo! Babel Fish Toolbar.  It lets you translate among all the languages currently spoken on Answers, plus eight others.
So, enjoy our worldwide crew’s different takes on Answers!

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

Self-voting: Back by popular demand! The people spoke, and we listened–we’ve put back the ability to vote for your own answers. The arguments were thorough and far-ranging, from “but you can vote for yourself in political elections” to “sometimes it’s the only way I can resolve a question”. Thanks to everyone for their input.

Improved layout (see Fig. 1): We moved the search box up to the green bar, and the “My Q&A” link to the right side of the bar. This makes it easier to find both elements, and cleans up the clutter. The points widget was moved to the left side, above the category list, and now shows your avatar when you’re logged in!

Stats on My Q&A page (see Fig. 2): It’s now much easier to see how you’re doing, graphically. The new module on your My Q&A page shows the stats of your questions and answers–the questions tab shows the number and percentage of your open, voting, resolved, and deleted questions, and the answers tab shows the number and percentage of your best answers.

No limit on number of answers: We’ve removed the limit on the number of answers a question can receive (it used to be 100), so everybody gets a chance to answer the really popular questions. Questions with more than 30 answers will have paging to make them easier to browse and read.

Spelling suggestion on search results page: To give you extra help in finding what you’re looking for, we added spelling suggestions on the search results pages. When you type in a misspelled word or phrase, the results page will show the header “Did you mean:”, followed by the suggested spelling. Clicking on the suggested spelling will generate another search based on the correction.

Links to international Yahoo! Answers sites: In the footer of every page, you’ll now see links to the five English-language Answers sites.

“Show me another” bug fixed: Now, when you click on the “Show me another” link after taking an action like rate or vote, you will be shown a different question. Previously, you were shown the same question.

We hope you like the changes!