A new University of Minnesota study finds that you basically get what you pay for when you use online question-and-answer sites such as Yahoo! Answers and the now retired Google Answers . The quality of answers also tends to improve when more people respond to your question. See results of the “Predictors of Answer Quality in Online Q&A Sites” paper, which involved posing 126 questions across assorted Q&A sites. The researchers found Yahoo! Answers performed pretty well, even compared to reference librarians and an ask-an-expert site.
The University of Minnesota 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 as judged by a panel of evaluators. These answers were long and detailed, with many links to source material.
University of Minnesota computer science and engineering professor Joseph Konstan said in a statement: “Solutions that simply direct questions to a single individual don’t achieve results as well as those that open the question and answers to a larger community.”
