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April 9, 2008
A new study by CSE researchers, professor Joseph Konstan and graduate student Max Harper, revealed that the answer quality provided by online question-and-answer Web sites, such as Yahoo! Answers and Google Answers, depends on two factors -- how much you pay and how many people contribute to your answer. News of this research was posted on the ScienceDaily Web site.
The study posed 126 questions across a variety of Q&A sites and found that paying $10 or more to get your question answered at the now-closed Google Answers site yielded the highest-quality answers. Surprisingly the Web site Yahoo! Answers, which provides answers for free, performed as well as Google Answers when the fee was low ($3) and outperformed reference librarians and an ‘ask-an-expert’ site. Researchers attributed this success to the large online community that contributes to that site’s answers.
The results of the study were reported in the academic research paper titled “Predictors of Answer Quality in Online Q&A Sites.” The paper was published in the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008) proceedings, and presented at the conference in Florence, Italy, on April 8. To view this paper visit, Q & A Web site research.
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