Comparing Question and Answer Services

From Technology Review comes this comparison, What's the Best Q&A Site?. The article rates the sites based on a couple of questions and gives points. The search engines compared are Askville, AnswerBag, Live QnA, Wondir, Yedda Answers, and Yahoo! Answers. There are plenty of other services, but I found the ratings interesting, with Yahoo! Answers coming out at the top. Here are the rankings and the number of points each received.

• 11 Yahoo Answers
• 7 Live QnA
• 6 Askville
• 4 AnswerBag, Wondir, and Yedda Answers

I found the concluding comments about these services to be especially perceptive:

It's important to realize that the social Q&A sites are intended as much for the entertainment and aggrandizement of the answerers as for the education of the questioners. The site that gives answerers the most exposure, therefore, is likely to be the one that thrives the longest.