Search Engines Find a Role for Humans By KEVIN J. DELANEY Wall Street Journal
May 11, 2006; Page B1 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114730887685249733.html?mod=technology_featured_stories_hs Web search engines rely on complex algorithms and tens of thousands of computer servers to provide the best results. Now, in a twist, some of the biggest search companies are turning to real live humans to boost their offerings. In December, Yahoo Inc. introduced an ad-supported service called Answers that allows regular consumers to answer questions posed by other Yahoo users. Late last week, Microsoft Corp. disclosed plans for a similar service, to be released soon, that it calls Windows Live QnA. To query Yahoo's Web-based service, available at answers.yahoo.com, a user enters a question and is then able to view a list of answers as other users enter them. Consumers can also search through past questions and answers and forward them to friends. The companies believe that the user-submitted answers will improve the quality of their search services, tapping knowledge and opinions not easily accessed otherwise, though they acknowledge that some users may submit wrong or misleading responses. A high number of queries go unanswered by search engines because the knowledge isn't necessarily on the Web or indexed or measured for relevance by the search services, says Steve Stanzel, general manager for Microsoft's Windows Live Search. "We think people can get more credible answers from people sometimes." Yahoo and Microsoft both hope that over time the services will help increase their shares of the multibillion-dollar search market. Yahoo says its search-market share in Taiwan rose significantly from the end of 2004 to the end of 2005 in part as a result of an answers service it released there in 2004. Despite investments by Yahoo and Microsoft to improve their search engines in the U.S., market leader Google Inc. has increased its share over the past year. In March, Google had 49% of U.S. search queries, according to research firm NetRatings Inc. Yahoo and Microsoft handled 23% and 11% of queries, respectively. Google released an Answers service in April 2002, but its program relies on prescreened researchers to respond to questions, with users charged a minimum of $2.50 for answers. The researchers, who are paid for each question they answer, have to submit an essay explaining why they want to participate and pass a series of tests. Other specialized sites, such as Wondir Inc., rely on volunteers to answer user questions. In March, Yahoo Answers had 3.9 million U.S. users, compared with 1.4 million for Google Answers, according to NetRatings. Wednesday, Google unveiled several new search technologies that will allow consumers to share information and use others' expertise to improve the relevance of search results. One, Google Co-op, lets organizations, businesses and individuals label Web pages relevant to their areas of expertise. (See related article.) On Yahoo's U.S. Answers service, the questions -- and answers -- vary widely. Earlier this week, a user who asked "What part of the body contains the most bones?" got eight responses within 10 minutes. They ranged from "wrists" to "feet" to "spine." (The correct answer, according to MedicineNet.com: the hand and the foot; no Yahoo user answered both.) Other questions included "What are must-see things at Niagara Falls and surrounding area?" and some apparently intended to stimulate a response or discussion, such as "What is your religion?" (The user asking that particular version of the question selected "Hey man, I'm Jewish!!" as the best response among the 11 submitted.) Consumers rate the responses, and Yahoo has created a point system that rewards individuals whose answers generate the most top ratings. Yahoo also includes some of the answers it receives in the search results that search-engine users see. To date, users have submitted more than 10 million responses to Yahoo Answers. One regular contributor is Emily Fontes, a 24-year-old childbirth educator in Lynnwood, Wash. She has answered about 400 questions since January, mostly about pregnancy, childbirth, newborn care and breastfeeding, areas in which she has professional expertise. Last month, she posted a question, asking for help after she found a garter snake in her home. She followed one Yahoo user's advice to fix the weather stripping on her doors and hasn't been visited by snakes since. "Since it's user driven and there's an unlimited amount of users out there, you never know who's going to have the information you need," she says. The approach does have potential limitations, including spotty advice on technical issues. The flagship for the strategy of tapping into user knowledge is the consumer-written online encyclopedia Wikipedia. While building up a huge, free online reference source, Wikipedia has also been dogged by charges of user-introduced inaccuracy and manipulation. In response, it has recently tightened its user-contribution policies. Jonathan Lowrie, a 34-year-old animal biologist in Somerset, N.J., says he has seen incorrect responses selected by Yahoo users as the best answers, though he says that happens less frequently now than when the service was introduced. For their part, the search engines say that consumers themselves tend to point out inaccuracies and abuses, since there's a good chance that some of the engines' millions of users are expert on any given topic. "Communities to some extent start to police themselves," says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president for search and marketplace. Building on its point system, he says, Yahoo plans what he calls a "reputation system" so users can quickly assess a responder's track record for high-quality responses. Services like Answers point to a broader movement by Internet companies to tap user content and knowledge, ranging from digital photos and videos to restaurant reviews. Yahoo in particular has focused on this area, including when it acquired the photo-sharing site Flickr. Answers illustrates Yahoo's broader focus on what it calls "social search." That strategy involves having users annotate and save Web links and post reviews and other content that their friends can access easily. Yahoo Answers sprang from conversations between Mr. Weiner and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who had observed the success of similar services in Asia. Because the number of Web pages in some Asian languages, such as Korean, is smaller, search engines had trouble producing enough relevant results for some queries. Answer services helped to address that problem by drawing on users to fill in the gaps in online content. Yahoo executives initially weren't sure such services would have the same impact in the U.S., given the large number of English-language Web pages for search engines to crawl. But by last year members of Mr. Weiner's team were convinced that answer services had social dimensions in addition to search, as people connected with each other and shared information. Their point system was devised to give users an incentive to respond to questions. Mr. Weiner says one response to a question he posed recently about how to improve living standards for the working poor "blew my mind." He now believes "there's no limitation to the kind of questions that can be answered on this service." He suggests a scenario in which before too long a child writing a school report about China might ask a question directly of Chinese users through Answers, with the question and responses directly translated by an existing Yahoo text-translation service. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list medianews@twiar.org To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
