Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

 Whenever anyone asks us about Yahoo! Answers, we immediately focus on the aspects of asking and answering questions, but it’s also important to emphasize the millions of Q&As that you can readily search at any given moment.

For example, search is a great way to see whether your question may already have been asked and answered in the past. Running a quick search before asking a common question like “why is the sky blue?” can help keep repetitious Q&A to a minimum.

We also find that using search to find open questions to answer makes my time spent on Answers feel more worthwhile. We use our Advanced Search and choose Open Questions under the “question status” section to find Q&A with topics to my liking — playing guitar or marathon training. Advanced Search can also be used to search a specific category or a particular timeframe for Q&A. For example, we could restrict a search to find only open questions in the Cars and Transportation section if we wanted to answer open questions specifically about car maintenance.

While many longtime Answerers are probably already familiar with many of these uses of search in Answers, there are still some secrets you may not be familiar with. For example, many of you have expressed the desire to sort by “Date” and by “Number of Answers.” While we have plans to make this easier in the future, the ability to apply these sorting options to search results currently exists. As a special treat to our blog readers, here are a couple secret tricks that let you do this:

• To sort by date, do a search and then click in the address bar of your browser. Add this to the text to the end of the URL “&s=-date” and hit Enter. Here is an example of a search on “Spider-Man” sorted by the most recently asked questions:

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=spider%20man&s=-date

• To sort by number of answers, do a search and then click in the address bar of your browser. Add this text to the end of the URL “&s=-answer_count” and then hit Enter. Here is an example of a search on “global warming” with questions that have the most answers first:

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=global+warming&s=-answer_c…

All tricks and tips aside, we’ve recently made some improvements to our search algorithm on the backend to help return more accurate results for each query. So please check it out and let us know what you think. The team that worked on these improvements feels that these are only the first steps in improving search – there will be more to come. Please let us know any other suggestions you have to help improve your search experience.

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team