Yahoo! Answers

We receive emails regularly from many of you expressing your interest in writing a blog post on the Answers blog.

As much of our success is down to our amazing community members, we want to extend an offer to all you – the opportunity to volunteer a blog post and have it published on the Answers blog!

Have you ever dreamed of being famous in the US? Then this is your chance! If your blog hits the spot we may even feature it on our sister-blogs in one of the 21 countries where we blog and translate it into some of the 9 languages we operate in.

This is your chance to have your voice heard, and have millions of people read your words! If that isn’t incentive enough, how about an extra 100 points for each post we publish?

How do I become a guest blogger?

Simple – come up with a suggestion or a full blog post and email it to y_answrs_favorites@yahoo.com.

Here are a few tips and rules to follow:

1) What should you write about? – Focus on what would interest the Answers Community. We are open to any subject area, even if only slightly related to Answers. This could include educational, instructional or informative topics. Some examples are as follows:

o Subjects that you may have professional or personal experience in, for example if you have recently planned a wedding, you may want to pitch a topic on “How to organize a wedding?”
o Or you could pitch ideas based on your personal experience on Answers, such as tips on getting the most out of Answers, things that could be improved, and anything that you would like to share with the Answers community.

2) Use correct spelling and grammar. The more understandable your suggestion is, the higher the chance it has to be used or chosen as a possible blog topic.

3) If you use any Answers content in your blog posts, it should adhere to the Community Guidelines.

Finally, the legal bit – your blog will be featured on the site in accordance with our TOS. We reserve the right to translate and make editorial changes to your blog if selected.

We look forward to hearing from you – y_answrs_favorites@yahoo.com

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We are pleased to introduce a cool new way to help you stay on top of your Yahoo! Answers activity wherever you are on the web – this is the Answers app for the Yahoo! Toolbar.

From now on, if a question suddenly pops into your head there is no need to navigate away from the page you are on – just click on the Answers app on your Yahoo! Toolbar and ask the Answers community directly and instantly!

Many of you may already be familiar with the Yahoo! Toolbar, which is a great way to make your surfing experience more efficient and streamlined by keeping all the information you need in a single click. If you haven’t yet experienced the benefits then download the Yahoo! Toolbar now and enhance your Internet experience by:
• Reducing the time needed to load various sites.
• Getting instant access to your Yahoo! account and other properties by just clicking a button.
• Getting instant access to Yahoo!’s powerful search engine.

What exactly is the Answers app?

Here is a quick walkthrough of the new Answers app:

1-App icon
The App icon lets you navigate directly to Answers at the click of a button, preview your activity, and ask questions without leaving the page you’re on.

2-App module
The App module provides 3 tabs for you to easily manage and check your favorite Yahoo! Answers content.

My Activity tab: Shows the last 5 questions/answers you asked along with your latest points tally.

Ask tab: Let’s you dive straight into asking questions directly from the module.

Browse tab: See the latest questions asked or browse to your favorite categories using the list.

3- Related Links
The Related links section takes you directly to the relevant sections on the Answers site.

4 – Search Answers
We’ve included a Search box to get quick access to the information you are looking for.

Tell us what you think
Once you have given the new Answers app a test drive, tell us what you think on the Forum or leave your comments here, on the blog.

We trust you will find the Yahoo! Toolbar and the Answers app to be a useful addition to your Answers experience!

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Photo by wallyg

Yahoo! Answers is hitting the streets and for all of you Answers fans, here’s your chance to shine on video! The Yahoo! Answers team has selected some fun questions and they’re headed to the streets of San Francisco to see how well YOU can answer them. Think you’ve got the skills to answer their questions? Come on out to show your support and share your knowledge. We’d love to meet some of our community members! We’ll also have some fun stuff to give out for your participation.

Schedule on Monday, May 17:

Marina Green: 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PT
Ferry Building: 10:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. PT
1 Powell Street (Bart and Trolley Stop near Union Square): 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. PT
SFO (Domestic Food Court): 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. PT

Hope to see some of you!

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Today, we are introducing a brand-new quiz that will test your community guidelines knowledge! Do you know the difference between chatting and point gaming? Have you committed a violation without understanding what you did wrong? Test your understanding: it’s fun, and if you pass, you will earn 20 points!

Why are Community Guidelines important?
Our site continues to grow at an incredible speed and we have thousands of new people signing up every week. To keep our Answers community a fun and informative place it is important to understand our community guidelines.

What improves our site’s content is understanding how to ask questions and how to write a great answer. Like any other community, members must follow a set of principles in order to keep our site a safe, fun and positive. As members of our community, we want you to understand the following:

Test your knowledge!
We encourage new members of the community to read the community guidelines so that our community can continue to be a helpful place for you. By following, the above points our site will continue to be a place where members can find answers to questions that you were always curious about.

Take the community guidelines quiz to test your knowledge, earn points and let us know what you think!

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Photo by Rasmin

This week Yahoo! Answers reached an important milestone – we received our 1 billionth answer!

From the small beginnings when we received our first answer from the public back in December 2005 we have now become the largest and most popular global Q&A site on the internet, available in 9 languages across 21 countries.

The volume of contributions we receive from the Answers community on a daily basis is mindboggling.  Yahoo! Answers currently receives:

823,966 questions and answers per day…

that works out to 34,331 per hour or 572 per minute

which is 10 questions and answers posted EVERY second!

The first answer on Answers

It’s difficult to pinpoint the first answer to the first question once Answers was opened to the public, but one of the first-ever answers came to this question -“Why are yawns contagious?”

This was one of many questions you’ve always wanted to know the answer to, but didn’t know how to find – until Yahoo! Answers came along.

The most answered questions of all time…

Through the years, we have had numerous celebrities and leading political figures appear on Yahoo! Answers.  Their questions have proven to be overwhelmingly popular with the community due to the large numbers of answers received.

Here’s a rundown of some of the biggest:

• The most popular question ever was from Hillary Clinton who received over 38,000 answers to her question: “Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?”.

• This is closely followed by Oprah Winfrey’s question with over 37,000 responses

• During the 2008 US election campaign, President Barack Obama sought the wisdom of the Answers community to ask “how can we engage more people in the democratic process?”.  He received nearly 18,000 answers.

• As part of the ONE campaign to Make Poverty History, Bono took the time to select David C’s response as the best answer to his question, What can we do to make poverty history?, from the 29,458 received.

The quirkiest questions of all time…

The following are some of the most interesting and original questions that our Answers community has asked:

• What numbers and letters do you key on you keyboard to make a heart symbol?

• Is eating the inside of an orange peel good for you?

• How far east can you go before you’re heading west?

Drum roll…

The honor of providing the 1 BILLIONTH answer on Yahoo! Answers goes to cgramer2 (for their excellent response to this question: What laptop part can I replace to speed up my pc?

Thank you cgramer2 and THANK YOU Answers Community.  It is you all who have made this site such a phenomenal place where information can be exchanged and opinions heard.  Thanks to our amazing community for making this milestone happen!

So, if you ever have a question?  Yahoo! has an answer… over one billion of them!

—YAT

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