New Feature: The Question Recommender
**Update: Question Recommender has been enhanced to allow you to reject questions that you don’t want to answer. You can do this by hovering over a question in the Recommended Tab and then clicking the “X” button. This will prevent that question from appearing again in your Recommended list. We hope you like this improvement**
We know that as a member of the Answers community, one of the most rewarding and worthwhile experiences is to answer the questions from other members and share your knowledge.
We know you spend a lot of time looking for questions that pique your interest or that you can relate to so we want to help you find these questions quickly. Therefore, we hope you will enjoy our new feature – the Question Recommender – which will help you discover questions that suit your knowledge and interests based on your previous activities on Yahoo! Answers.
Soon, these recommendations will start to appear in a new module called “Recommended” which will appear on the home page and category pages. As we are first rolling out a trial version, not all of you will see this immediately. This is our way to test and check that everything is working well. We will eventually roll it out to all English language sites. In the future, we plan to extend this feature to other languages as well.
We hope you enjoy using ‘Recommended’ questions. Please note that it’s in its early days and this is a self-improving feature. The tool will evolve and recommendations will update based on questions you choose to answer, so that you will always have a fresh set of options to choose from.
Thanks for reading,
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then the trial version is working quite badly cos ‘ Is Selena Gomez pregenet(sic) ‘ is not the usual type of question I like to answer
this is a good idea i like it.
This is a cool idea. But can you please not make it go to the Recommended tab by default? It gets annoying. I want to answer questions in the open section and it’s kinda frustrating having to click that everytime. Other than that this seems like a cool new feature.
I hate this feature so far. I dislike how any time I click the section I wanna answer in, it auto goes to my recommendations instead of the normal open ones. It’d be fine if it didn’t do this.
I dislike this option
Good idea. (Third)
Not good idea due to trolls selecting the questions that violate the CG.
Just now I saw this feature enabled for me. I liked it.
Actually, when I came back from office, I will go to unanswered question or popular questions. Because I can’t check all the questions. This recommended feature is pretty nice.
As of now, I observed this
1. Questions which are not answered by me.
2. Filtering is not time based. Actually no filtering is available (new/older | popular | no of answers)
3. Popularity is not considered. Stars are not displayed.
4. Default page is set as Recommended.
Overall, I liked it. I hope we can see better things.
I find this feature quite handy. Though not all recommended questions are in my favor, about 75% of them seem to be related to questions that I have answered in the past. Also this brings up qusetions which I would not have known ever existed for me to answer.
How is it working for others?
Time to let my answers shine! : D
Good idea!
I like it a lot. Default upon log in rocks my world, I only browse one category, rarely two. Thanks!
It is highly aberrant going to Recommendations as default.
isn’t that what the categories are for?
I actually like the idea because for me it lists questions that I answer most of the time anyway that I might otherwise never see, but I don’t like it being used for default when I click on any section.
Again, I find this feature to be very Big Brother like and unnecessary.
Please, please don’t make “recommended” the default when clicking on a category name. Or at least give us some option to opt out of this. I want “open questions” to be the default.
To the comment about categories above:
though categories provide some filtering, that’s not enough. For example, look at ‘Politics’ under ‘Politics & government’. It contains so many topics and I like to answer only on few of them. The ‘Recommended’ tab does the trick. In addition it also shows me good recommendations from other categories, so I don’t need to visit many category pages, I just get many questions I like to answer in one place.
I agree with the more positive remarks about this addition. I think it’ll come in handy for those of us that like certain types of questions.
You’ve got two thumbs up from me! : )
This doesn’t seem new. I always had the option of answering from a list of questions specially suggested for me based on what I usually answer.
Strange enough now that this is announced, I don’t seem to have my usual list today.
I agree that it’s a great addition, but it shouldn’t jump to “Recommended” by default.
They need to make it sothat the recommended questions are not from people that are blocked
Or there should be a way to at least make the questions go off your recommended list if you don’t want to answer them.
It’s a cool idea, but it’s not working. See, now Y!A takes me to the “Recommended” tab by default and it’s pissing me off. All the answers under that tab are hours or even days old, and I want the chance to answer new questions, not old ones that nobody is paying attention to anymore. And also, it doesn’t quite work right – it keeps suggesting questions about caring for your fish, even though I only answer questions in the “Books and Authors” section. Please at least make an option to NOT go to the Recommended tab automatically, as it’s extremely annoying.
Is there any way to make it so it does NOT automatically go to this when opening a category? It really is quite annoying to open Philosophy and see every single post about the meaning of life before switching back over to Open Questions.
I have a “suggestion.” I’m sure everyone gets annoyed by kids who ask for help on Math HW (I’m a teacher, BTW), and who don’t want to learn, just “give me the answer, I’m outta here.” I have a feeling Yahoo has the capability (NOT utilized) to track users (i.e., students) who are not even “thanking” by using “Best Answer.” I would suggest these users be “starred” by the system, and eventually warned they are not here to just “get answers.” It’s tacky, yeah, but requiring them to at least select the Best Answer is a start in the right direction, to illustrate that caring “Answer Givers” are not here to be taken advantage of…We Are Here (hopefully) with the altruistic motive to enlighten the students, not give them a free pass. What do you say, guys?
…make sure your shoes does not smell when you throw it…lolz…
Could be a nice feature, but I hate it as the default.
I would like to know how to turn it off.
is there a way to disable that feature? I check for questions. Nothing catches my interest. I refresh the page after a couple of minutes and am looking at the “recommended” (for a given value of recommended). I don’t want that. I just want to return to the newest questions. Looks like a fail in the requirements gathering phase.
This feature was here before. It was broken at first, then it was fixed, then someone broke it again even worse than before. The latest ways it was broken included that (a) it recommended questions that had been deleted, and (b) the feature to get rid of a recommended question so you don’t have to see it again didn’t work. AT ALL. So you’d try to get rid of a 2-week-old deleted question from your recommended list, and it would keep popping back up!
If recommendations are not subject to some serious regression testing and far better requirements analysis (including not being the default), I’d rather you left it out.
I had a go & think it is a brilliant idea. The sooner it is up & running the better.
This smells like eBay’s “Best Match” failure. I and I’m sure most of us, are quite capable of finding our own questions to answer. Presuming that you can know our minds better then we do is a major conceit.
It’s offensive, and I hate it. Don’t presume to know what interests me. You don’t.
If it’s an option?
It’s OK, but like another said:
I want it off by default.
Or I don’t want it at all!
I hated things stuffed down my throat as a child…
and I think I like it even less now!
d;o)
I hate the idea that this is the default when you get to the questions page. It’s really annoying and all of the “recommended” questions are essentially the same (at least they are in religion and spirituality).
In short I really don’t like this new feature. It sucks.
I hate that when I switch sections, the recommended questions stay on top. If I wanted to answer those questions, I would have done so the first time I saw them.
Also, however the questions are picked is ridiculous. Just because I answer ONE question about shoes, does not mean I want to be attacked by every question about shoes from the past two days, including the creepy foot fetish people who ask fifty dozen questions about how sweaty my feet get. No joke, that question keeps popping up, all because I answered a question about shoes.
I haven’t seen it yet myself, but do we get to finetune it ourselves? I mean, do I get the chance to indicate which keywords and keyphrases usually attract my interest?
Which categories I am (not) interested in?
If we don’t get that option I think it would be a pointless feature
I really dislike this feature, at least in its present form.
I much prefer to browse using the Open tab. While I might use the Recommended tab sometimes, I’d like it a lot better if it was not the default forcing me to click back to the Open tab every time.
I really dislike this feature, at least the way it is set up.
While I might use it sometimes, I much prefer to browse using the Open tab. I’d like this feature better if it wasn’t the default every time I go to a category.
Recommended questions are great for people who want it, but it shouldn’t be default. In fact, I’m not even interested in the majority of the recommended questions. Many of us have preferred categories, and we skim through the newest questions in those categories. I strongly dislike having recommended categories as default because I have to constantly switch to the newest questions. If this is implemented, at least give us an option of what category (Open, resolved, in voting, recommended) is default for our profile.
I agree that defaulting to “recommended” is a pain in the proverbial. It is starting to put me off answering at all.
I would want this “Recommended tab” to be an additional option on the default page, but not to go straight to it as the default.
Refering to the comment
“Comment posted on June 30th, 2012 at 9:24 am by Larry Blau” about blocking people who don’t choose a Best Answer, what if none of the answers given are concidered as Best.
Would it be a case of choosing the “Least Worse” answer??
Don’t know RSS, plus, it did not make any sense to me, the new RECOMMENDED stuff, even if not up yet, I’m yet to know what it’s meaning is:
I hated having it as a default, and don’t think I’d ever use it. Just slowed everything down. I like open questions and answer a wide variety of things on a couple sections I prefer. BTW, I also dislike there being a question limit every day. It just forces people to make a second account for more questions, which in Politics means more trolls.
I hope it’s not too late to say that I like the Recommended tab. It sort of popped up for me now and then.
I think it should be on the list of tabs; but, it shouldn’t be the default. Too many people seem to dislike it. But, I like the choices that were put on it for me. And, since it is already coded, it should be available for use.
I would much rather have a button / setting to be notified if the original poster added more information.
A lot of times, not enough information is in the original question
Yahoo!, I have been a regular member here since August of ’06, and have seen many “improvements” to your services along the way. This new question recommender is by far the most annoying, which causes me to pine away for the original launch days.
Please, Yahoo! be rid of it.
If I wanted to answer questions which are two and three days old, I would simply scroll through the various pages.
As one who has a tendency to be as helpful as possible, I have spent considerable time and effort researching and typing answers. Imagine my horror when I did exactly that in the Food category yesterday … only to find that the question was three days old. The asker won’t be back to read my answer, which involved what items can and cannot be safely kept when a refrigerator has been allowed to warm up by accident.
The other two answers in were the typically uninformed which strive to be first in order to get those worthless two points. We all know the type. These answers also told the asker to discard everything, which is incorrect information.
So I ask, how is your new feature helping anyone? It certainly did nothing for him, as it does nothing for me. I’m not about to waste my time refreshing like the dickens simply to avoid what is a very unnecessary feature.
If you want to keep this feature, then fine, it’s your choice… Just give us the option to opt out of the new “recommender” rather than opting out of Y!A altogether.
Many good users have left over the years. Why lose more over this unnecessary feature?
I think this is a good idea, but I don’t like it as a default. I have to keep clicking back to ‘Open’ and that gets really annoying.
Here’s the thing, people are used to getting answers in the first few hours of having their question posted – they don’t expect to get new answers two and three days later. That’s not productive. Make it an option, and do not have it as the default tab. And limit the questions to ones that are less than 8 hours old or haven’t received answers.
You should have had this a long time ago.
It saves me time spent paging through useless questions!
Making it a tab option (not a default) would create a less controversial feature.
It’s a neat idea, especially when all the new questions might be boring. But we should not be automatically directed there. It’s unfair to people who aren’t lucky enough to be recommended.
I prefer answering fresh questions.. if there’s nothing to answer, I will go to the recommended section and add to their list of answers.
This is a horrible idea, I like answering new questions, I don’t even bother answering one once it hits the second page.
Some people may like it but I don’t. There should at least be an option so you can pick which setting you want as your default. Whether it be the new feature or the old one.
Way to go Yahoo!Answers
Time saving and we can focus more on the things that we know and would like to answer.
This better be out soon. Am waiting…
I love this idea, it will definetly help find wuestions we want to answer quicker than usual. Hopefully your idea will be ready soon.
I LOVE this option but it does not work on my laptop. I have it on my iPad sometimes but not my computer. I wish I could access it on both and am not sure why I cannot but I would love for it to be something I could access all the time
sounds good..
This feature is alright but being forced to choose to answer a qeustion that already has many answers is stupid. Should be able to choose from open,in voting,resovled,recomanded and have it remeber your last choice because every time you go to answer another question its another click to go back to open
There’s a fundamental problem with this feature you are suggesting for us to use. It can only decide what to recommend based on our previous answers so, how would we find a question that we didn’t knew we want to answer ever before? I suggest that you give us few sample questions from all around yahoo answers to first answer and then decide which ones we answer best and then decide on that instead of just basing this feature on past answers. Just a suggestion. Keep up the good work.
While this isn’t a bad idea, making it the default for everyone was a bad idea. In my profile, I should be able to select which tab I want to be my default (Recent, Popular, My Network, Recommended).
If you check the suggestion boards, you’ll see a lot of people complaining about Recommended being the default.
I hate being directed to the “Recommended” tab after I click on the section I want to visit after I answer. They should just make it so that you’re not directed to that tab.
Okay, I don’t mind the new page, but I do HATE that Yahoo automatically defaults me to that page, causing me to ALWAYS have to click on Open.
This is beyond annoying.
If only you could reject the reccomended feauture.
I understand that some people enjoy this new feauture, but at the same time a lot of people hate it as well and I wish that we get the option to at least choose whether or not we have to deal with it
I hate how it automatically goes to recommended when you click on a category to look at open ones.
I do not feel it is your place to recommend questions.
There should be an option to turn the recommended feature on or off.
Another thought. Tell us this. For those users who either block cookies or regularly clean out their caches, will all the Xing we do be for nothing?
Cant stand that it defaults to this. It also feels quite “Big Brother” ish to me. I don’t like being followed.
That’s nice to know.
Now, when will you do the update that makes it so the Recommended tab isn’t the default (and the Open tab is)?
p
That’s a slight improvement, but what I really want is a way to default questions to “Recent” and not “Recommended”. Maybe something in my profile?
It used to be when I clicked on the smiley face for “Answer”, I’d get the most recent questions – of any and all subjects. That’s what I want. Now I click on it and it takes me to recommened, then I have to go click on the “Recent” tab.
If you read the feedback on this feature, users don’t want you to improve it – by and large they want you to remove it and go back to the way that it was. Not all change is an improvement. This is probably some VP’s pet project, but there comes a time to admit that the idea was a bad idea that the users hate.
I get that you’re trying to get unanswered questions answered (that’s the only logical reason I can see for having this feature), but it’s really irritating for most of us to have it be the default setting. You should at least give us the option to see new questions first on the main page rather than having to click them every time.
I think the whole thing is fine, however……
Every time it defaults to the recommended tab, I have to fight the urge to climb a bell tower with a high powered rifle. Honestly… are you that desperate for feedback that you have to take hostages? PLEASE.. stop making it compulsive.
So to get to a usable recommended page (<24 hours old, <3 answers), I will have to X out how many thousand questions? No matter what else you are thinking about – STOP. You are not listening to the users who see recommended 3-4 day old questions and questions with 5 or more answers already. And most of all, you are not listening to those that do not want this forced on them. You can not fix this tab without giving the user some options.
Another thought. Tell us this. For those users who either block cookies or regularly clean out their caches, will all the Xing we do be for nothing?
That’s great now when you going to do away with the pointless ‘thumbs’?
And actually the “recommended” tab is a PIA. I want the current open questions to appear not have to remind myself to toggle back over after every answer I post or question I view. I don’t care about what was posted 5hrs or 5 days ago. I want 5 mins ago.
I don’t think I’d like the feature the way some people here describe, that it is a default position to take you to that tab on the home page, HOWEVER, I wonder why my recommended questions tab disappeared altogether? I have no recommended questions at all showing.
The only tabs available on my home page for open questions are
Recent
Popular
From My Network
and nothing else. Is the From My Network now supposed to be the recommended questions?
If so, that is not the default setting shown on my home page. the RECENT tab is the default question list on my home page.
Why is this different than what everyone I’ve spoken with have for their pages?
I don’t mind the “recommend a question” feature but I absolutely positvely DO NOT like that it automatically defaults to that page when I log in, or when the page refreshes. This is annoying. Please make it optional.
When we go into our specific category we do not want Recommended as default. Some of us answer in specific categories only.
It would be good to have this ad your profile, this with a lot of options like having different settings for different catefories. A sort of list of your own that you can edit for more categories and conbined categories. And having a button below your avator for changing it or set to more of the preset of the categories questions.
A better connection to Yahoo might be good too, to many times no connection. Need a save option to the local driver for the answserd question for trying later on.
It’s sometimes a lot of work to find and/or give an answer. Now I copy them, save them to note path and get back to it.
I like the tab, but I dislike how it’s the default. Can you please return it to the “Open” tab being the default?
Please make Open questions as default, rather than recommended questions. Just leave the recommended tab as it is. Just like how the voting and resolved questions appear like.
They are not automatically set to default unless we click on them
Fine. A feature to remove questions you don’t want in recommened! Now you have to take the time to remove things you don’t want in a feature you don’t want.
How about a feature in recommened that says click here if you don’t want recommended to be the default everytime you click on a category?
I don’t need the Yahoo babysitter choosing my questions for me!
Cool Idea.
Good Luck.
I don’t like this “recommended” list thing. One of the joys of YA was looking at all kinds of questions and then DECIDING FOR MYSELF which ones I want to answer. When I tuned in today all the questions were about crafts. Please go back to the old way of allowing us to make our own decisions about what we want to see and what we want to answer. We don’t need some computer program to tell us what to look at!
It would be better if you can reject users who constantly post the same question. Being able to reject so the specific questions don’t ever appear again is nice, but users will simply create new ones, so this problem doesn’t go away because the source of the problem- trolling users posting the same question over and over- will continue making them.
This is a bad idea. You have taken away our power to choose which questions we wish to answer. I don’t like tuning in and finding only one kind of question on the list. There have been many times that I have gone to a different topic to answer questions. Apparently that doesn’t work any more.
This is an option that we should be able to opt out of. I really resent having some computer program choose the list of questions available to me.
“Refresh” only brings back the same old questions. Please bring back the old way of doing it by clicking on page numbers so that we can choose where we want to answer questions.
You have taken all the joy out of YA!
Anytime I click on the word “genealogy” I want to be taken to the Open questions (most recent).
I actually really like this feature, except that you cannot chose when you want to use it. Sometimes I log in and it is on the recommended tab by default when I don’t want it to be. Other times when I do want to use it there is no recommended tab. They need to clear this up.
So good idea,thanks
please give us the option of disabling it or making it no longer our default tab!! It’s a terrible option!
YEAAA- Finally I got rid of it. I cleaned out my files and my cookies. Didn’t have any cache.
Fix the tab so that it does not automatically set to default and we’ll all stop complaining.
Great let’s add a feature to a feature we all don’t want to begin with …
Be all well and good if the “recommended” tab wasn’t the default.
The only complaint I have, which has been commented on many times already, is that it goes to recommended questions by default. After a while this gets to be very obnoxious.
I hope there will be some way to shut this off in the future. I cannot STAND it jumping straight to recommended right after I answer I question. I want to look at all open questions, not just one the site thinks I should look at.
It’s been removed from my device. I hope permanently. Thank you so much!
Bad idea. It should not be the default. It should be able to be turned off.
Funny thing; I haven’t had the ‘Recommended’ tab for a while now, and I don’t miss it as I hated the fact it showed more questions related to one off answers I gave than stuff I’m actually knowledgeable about, also, the ‘x’ just removed them temporarily and put them back on the bottom of the list again.
Try fixing the broken things first, like the spell checker showing 44 errors when I’ve only typed 20 characters for instance…
I actually liked The Question Recommender, I don’t think it should be set to default, though. It gives me the opportunity to answer questions I have missed, without having to scroll through tons of questions to find questions that interest me.
I no longer have the QR.
Hooray! I no longer have your “new feature”! Thanks so much for turning it off! Now I can again decide for myself which questions to answer instead of being forced to use choices decided on by some computer programmer who is probably young enough to be my grandson.
good post
It’s a good idea, but allowing it to be default is quite annoying. It’s very irritating to always be sent to the recommended tab when all i want is new questions.
Good idea except for it being default…
Ugh, this is happening to me now. It happened when I erased my cookies. I think theres something in them that will make it stop.
Please undo it, yahoo. Its irritating.
I find it annoying that Recommended keeps popping up every time after I answer a question. I would like the OPTION of choosing if I want recommend or Open. Most Recommended are HOURS old, not new or minutes old. Why would I want to answer a question that is hours old? The person submitting it might not even read the answer, after so many hours. Please just give us the option to choose. It seems, as software advances in technology, we lose more and more control of our decision making. Windows Live Mail, for instance, had bright colored pages, but then it was changed to pastel colors, with no choice for us to make. We are stuck with pastel colors. Give us choices.