Yahoo! Answers

The Yahoo! Answers team is happy to roll out a new feature called ‘Trending Questions’- A set of five questions which will cover most popular events and top stories in your region. Trending Questions will be shown in a carousel above the main question on every question page.

As the feature is being introduced in a trial version not all of you will see the trending questions immediately.

Questions asked by the community, that match topics or events that are most asked or viewed will be eligible for the Trending Questions carousel. The Answers team will consider the following while selecting among eligible questions – the quality of questions and answers, time relevancy, questions gaining popularity on Answers, social networks and search engines. As new stories unfold, new sets of questions will show up in the carousel

So start discovering what your fellow community members have to say about the recent happenings and join the conversation. We hope you will enjoy this feature.

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It’s a milestone that should be celebrated: In June, we hit 300,000,000 questions asked on Yahoo! Answers! And for those of you, who cannot wrap their heads around all those zeros, we’re happy to repeat in words: Globally, 300 million times people have been asking for help, advice, and facts on our amazing questions and answers portal.

And our statistics reveal further interesting numbers:

On average, 2 questions are being asked and 6 answered per second. So this means there’s an astonishing 7,000 questions and an incredible 21,000 answers per hour. Wow!

The question that has been answered the most globally is the following one from the US: Which question would you like to ask the President of the United States Barack Obama? The question received a stunning 41,130 answers!

In the US, the most answered question (from a community member) was from Jack and he asked What will you remember most about Michael Jackson? It received 6407 answers!

In the UK, the most answered question (from a community member) was from Amanda R and she asked Why is it that some people seem to have it really easy in life and have good things happen to them?

We want to thank you for your trust, your loyalty, and your interest! And of course, we are excitedly looking forward to your next 100 million questions!

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With 54 million unique users in the U.S. and 250 million worldwide, Yahoo! Answers is among the largest knowledge-sharing communities on the Web. And according to the Business Journals network, it’s also the 5th largest social media network on the web. Since launching in 2005, Yahoo! Answers has been a place where people can ask and answer questions on any topic. Clearly, people continue to share their experience and insight in droves.

Thanks to all of our wonderful community! It’s you that keeps this thriving social media network going!

Read the rest of the Business Journal Article here.

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**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.

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Many of you show a lot of interest in the content that appears in the “Best of Answers” module and often ask how this is selected and what decisions go into what we choose to highlight. Today, we’d like to tell you more about this prominent module on the Yahoo! Answers homepage. Follow us behind the scenes!

Firstly, the module called “Best of Answers” actually features a number of different types of content; so let’s start with an overview of each of these types:

Best of Answers

The purpose of the “Best of Answers” module is to highlight the most interesting questions posted by you, the community. We can use this to feature either open or resolved questions.  Of course, if we choose a resolved question then we include the first few lines of the best answer too.

For this module we really look for content that’s unique or unusual.  The kind of content that makes us go “Whoa, I always wondered that!”

Special Feature

The Special Feature template is used to highlight questions that are being promoted by our team.  Examples include Celebrity questions or official questions asked with our Team account (i.e. Safer Internet Day).

Featured Sponsor

As you’d expect from the name, these feature questions asked by one of our Sponsors or Knowledge Partners.

Featured Content

We use this space to surface posts from our blog or to our pages on Facebook or Twitter.

How can you make it onto the Best of Answers?

We check the site every day for interesting questions, but that’s not the only way we select what we feature. In fact, we encourage you to submit any content you think deserves to appear on the Yahoo! Answers homepage. Have you found an interesting or quirky question? Have you provided a fantastic answer and helped someone out? Send it to y_answrs_favorites@yahoo.com and it might be selected to appear on the Yahoo! Answers homepage!

To increase chances of being featured:

- The question, resolved or closed, should be of general interest, and ideally something that is not widely known

- The answer should not be easily found on the internet

- Try finding questions showing unique or experience-based knowledge

- Ensure that an avatar or a personal image is used

- Make sure the content is clear and well expressed

- And last but not least, the content needs to abide by our Community Guidelines and the Terms of Service.

We hope this overview will give you a better understanding of how we choose content to as the `Best of Answers`.

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