The Anglos have it. The French have it. Even Google France has it… So maybe it’s time you did, too.
Ready for it? Ready for… la fièvre Bieber?!
Justin Bieber fever. Well, Answers.com has it covered; not sure whether to laugh or cry or put on a purple hoodie.
This post is dedicated to Julie, the Community Coordinator ‘merveilleux’ for Answers.com Français!
You may have noticed some extra activity in the WikiAnswers search box… or tiny badges on your bio page. Not to mention little snippets of text here and there.
No, aliens have not taken over WikiAnswers (this time). We’ve rolled out a couple of great new features that we hope will make asking, answering and searching a more pleasant and effective experience for you. Our goal with these features is to bring information more directly to you so you don’t have to search for it – and we hope you’ll let us know if we’ve achieved that goal. Now, without further ado, an overview of said features:
Asking a question? Looking up a person, place or thing? No problem – before you’ve even finished typing, we’ll show you if there’s a matching reference article – or if someone in the community has answered your question.
Just click the “All” radio button and start typing. Reference articles are prefaced by a book icon (
), and community Q&A are prefaced by a bubble icon (
). Or, choose just “Community Q&A” or “Reference Topics” to limit your search to one type of information. Our suggestions will appear in a list – click an item on the list, or hide the list if you’d rather not see it. (But we think it’s pretty helpful.)
Try looking up “Why is the sky blue?” The find-as-you-type results look like this:
Snippets are a short previews of current answers. By looking at snippets, you can get a sense of the answer before you click through to see the question page and question history. Snippets showed previously on the search results page, and now we’ve added them to the recent site activity pages and the category pages. If you’re watching for vandalism, you can now comb the snippets for spam and other bad answers without opening each question.
This is what snippets look like on the recent site activity page:
And on the category page:
Snippets are also a convenient way to determine on the spot if a question is answered or unanswered. No snippet? It’s unanswered.
Do you like peeking at other contributors’ contribution stats (or your own)? We’ve tweaked the design to make it even easier to see who they are and what they’ve done.
Visit anyone’s bio page and hover over a mini-badge to see the full badge in all its glory. Also, if you’re a Supervisor, look for a brand-new toolbox at the bottom of the stats box.
And, finally, a power tool for Supervisors: turbo Batch Revert, so you can undo weeks of vandalism in just one click. We have lifted the one-week limit on reverts, so go do your thing and catch those vandals!
Check out these tools and tell us what you think. They’ve been a long time coming, and we hope you enjoy them!
You may have noticed some small changes to the site today – and if you did, well, you’ve got sharp eyes. Much of today’s release was focused on bug fixes and performance improvements, and if your answers load faster than usual, feel free to tip your mental hat to our engineering team.
Meanwhile, we’ve added a few handy tools to the menu on the left-hand side of the page. (To access the full version of the menu pictured here, sign up/log in and it will appear immediately.) The new tools are:
So, what else is new in this release?
We’ve made it even easier to answer new questions on your favorite topic by adding a FAYT (find-as-you-type) search box to the unanswered question page. Just start typing and related categories will appear.
The Community Forum also saw a small but significant change today. Scroll down to the bottom of the forum, and you’ll see a new section called “Viewing this forum.” Listed there are all the other members and community assistants who are currently browsing the forum. If you need help with the site, or just advice from another WikiAnswerer, you can turn to these folks for help.
The category page was treated to a modest makeover to improve readability and flexibility. See if you can spot the differences between the old and the new designs!
That’s a wrap! Until next time… onward and upward!
UPDATE: Thanks to Matthew for pointing out that a fix for the missing bio pages didn’t, in fact, make this release. We apologize, and it’s on the way.
Today is the last day to vote for Answers.com in the Webware 100: Search and Reference category. Make sure you get your voice heard and make Answers.com a winner!
It’s that time of year… Time to vote in the 2009 Webware 100! That is CNET’s annual web awards to honor the people’s choice for best web apps, sites and services from a list of 300 finalists spread over ten categories.
More about the awards from CNET:
This year–the third year we’ve done the Webware 100–we had about 5,000 qualifying submissions from which we selected the final 300. These are 300 very strong Web apps, spread into 10 groups of 30 each.
And, like last year, Answers.com has been nominated and is a finalist in the Search and Reference category.
So what are you waiting for? Vote now and recognize your favorite encyclodictionalmanacapedia!
Voting ends on April 30th and winners will be announced on May 19th, so stay tuned.
Check this out: Answers.com, along with other popular information destinations, is listed as a featured search option on Soovle.com. Soovle is described as “An engine that provides the suggestion services from all the major providers in one place.”
You can pick your preferred search destination by clicking its logo. For instance, click the Answers.com logo and it’ll be carried over to the search bar. Then you can just enter your search term and voila!
There are several ways to search and there is also the possibility of “saving suggestions” for later. And for the curious among us, you can snoop around the top keyword searches and find out what others are tracking.
I know that yesterday I brought up a brand new feature on WikiAnswers – the Community Forum – but it seems there’s another new feature live, which, in my opinion, is just as cool.
Now when you do a search on WikiAnswers, your results come up with… snippets! Snippets are the first bits of text that are part of the greater answer. When you can see the snippet, you can get a quicker feel for whether an answer is correct, inappropriate, etc.
As one colleague said, this is going to further bring out the WikiAnswers-brand OCD in all of us.
Try to do a search now – type any topic into the advanced search bar and enjoy!
Search on WikiAnswers is now better than ever, but it can still be difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for. Here are some useful search tips from one of our local gurus. The words in double quotes are your search terms — what you type into the search box.
Typing:
“new car”
will search for the exact match of the whole string “new car” (like Google does)…
Next:
“new” “car”
will search for any question that contains both “new” AND “car” (regardless of whether they appear next to each other or in that order), but any question that contains only one of these words will not be in the results list…
You can combine this search with a some kind of OR-based search… For example:
“general motors” vehicle
will search for the whole string “general motors” and also for the word “vehicle”. Results that contain the word “vehicle” will come first, but if the word “vehicle” is not found, you’ll still see results for “general motors”…
And this query is more complicated:
“car” “ford” new
It will search for the questions that contain both “car” and “ford” and may also contain the word “new”. Results that contain the word “new” will come first, but if the word “new” is not found, you’ll still see results for “car” AND “ford”…
And of course you can use the old OR-based search just by typing:
new car
And this will give you all the questions with at least one of the words (while the questions that contain BOTH words will come first in the list).
So, in short: putting a word or a search term into quotes makes the search term mandatory, while any unquoted word stays optional (but the results containing the most optional words will come first in the search results list)…
That’s all 
Happy searching!
Now it’s even easier to search on WikiAnswers.
Let’s say you did a search for questions about gerbils… you would get a page like this, with a little line of text at the top:
Use this little tool to filter the results right here on the page, without doing a new search from scratch. For instance…
Limit your search to questions in the Gerbils category:
A little window will pop up so you can choose which categories to search in:
Choose whether you want to see answered, unanswered or all questions:
Done looking at questions about gerbils in general? Time to look up something more specific. Look up “food” instead – your results will still be from the Gerbils category.
And of course, you can always click on New Search or Advanced Search to start from scratch!
Happy searching!
Hooray for new things! While all you dads out there are tearing open envelopes and ripping up wrapping paper, we’re having a blast with the bubble wrap on this brand new baby:
The WikiAnswers Ask/Answer bar has a whole new look, same great taste. Or something… Last time I licked my monitor, it was for that new Starburst flavor, except it didn’t taste like Awesome Berry, it tasted more like LCD, which I thought was illegal, anyway.
WikiAnswers got a big fat biographical interview yesterday on AltSearchEngines, a blog covering the growing search engine scene.
While I might characterize WikiAnswers as less a search engine and more a directory of Q&A, there is a strong aspect of search that has been improved in recent weeks.
One of the unique things about WikiAnswers is that it utilizes the wiki format, creating a new page for every new question – unless the question is asked again, in which case you’ll get directed to the existing page. From there you can get the answer and add on to it if you know any more information.
Using smart language technology, the site searches its listing of Q&A to find questions that closely match what you’ve asked. If there is no exact match (which might even be the same question in different words) then you get a list of close matches. You can choose one of them as your question or ask your question separately.
So perhaps WikiAnswers may be viewed as a search engine of sorts – a self-growing search engine, that can only get better and better as you ask and answer more and more questions.
Answers.com is a Webware 100 finalist for it’s 2008 awards. Crenk.com decided to predict who the Webware 100 will include in this year’s list of sites, and – yay! – Answers.com made it there, in the Search & Reference category.
So I guess that means it’s settled, then. Answers.com will win a place in the top 100… but not without your help:
One of the questions that I am asked most often is, “How do I find the questions that I’ve posted on WikiAnswers?” Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news: finding your questions is easy. The bad news: there are no voice commands, so you will be required to click your mouse a few times.
<click click>
Here is some info on finding questions (along with any answers that contributors have offered):
If you don’t know the URL and your question is not on your Watchlist (located on the left side of the page in the blue shaded area), the easiest way to find it is to search for it (use Option 1).
You could also re-ask your question. That will take you to the existing question page. If you can’t remember the exact wording, ask something similar and see if it pops up in the list of possible same-as existing questions. Find your question and click on the link. If all else fails, click on My Bio Page, where you can view your history of contributions.
<click click>
My blogger-buddy Charles Knight over at AltSearchEngines.com has included Answers.com in the running for his Search Engine of the Year 2007 contest. Answers.com was Search Engine of the Month in September.
Love Answers.com and WikiAnswers? Help show support by voting for us! List Answers.com in a comment at the contest entry and also a little bit (or a lot) about why we’re the world’s greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia.
