As written for Social Media Today
One needn’t look further than last month’s announcement from LinkedIn to learn the business of Q&A search isn’t an easy one. The company pulled the plug on LinkedIn Answers, its Quora-like Q&A service, on Jan. 31.
Speaking of which, just Just Quora-search “Things Contributing to the Decline in Quora” to figure out the story there.
In fact, even Google couldn’t figure it out when they acquired Aardvark, a crowdsourced Q&A startup and shut it down a year later. It’s tough to get it right. Part of it is you need to be knowledgeable, not just entertaining to truly sustain.
ChaCha seems to have found the right mix.
The company is the leading real-time, human-powered question-and-answer (Q&A) site, and was just ranked the top answer provider on mobile devices in a new study. According to Butler Business Accelerator’s “Study on Q&A Platforms,” ChaCha’s mobile application for the Apple iPhone responded to 99 percent of the study’s questions with the highest degree of accuracy. The competition included familiar names including Siri, Quora, Ask.com, and Google.
ChaCha also scored the highest on the Butler University Q&A Intelligence Index, which measures the likelihood that a user can expect to receive a correct answer to any random question asked using natural language. The questions were asked via mobile services and randomized to cover both popular and less common questions.
The accuracy score measured how correct answers were in relation to an objective third party’s answer key that accounted for logic and bias. The coverage score measured whether an answer was returned within a three-minute window and assessed the first non-sponsored search result in Q&A platforms.
So get out there and don’t be afraid to ask.
