Hawking and Bono look for Yahoo! Answers

By Steve Malone

Posted on 10 Jul 2006 at 10:55

Yahoo! Answers has seen a surge of traffic following questions posted by two of the world's most famous people. Questions posed by Stephen Hawking and Bono have elicited tens of thousands of responses each.

The question posed by Stephen Hawking, 'How can the human race survive the next 100 years?', which was posted six days ago, has elicited a huge response from the visitors to Yahoo! Answers. The last time we looked at the number of responses there were 21,175, with more being added by the hour.

However Bono has now weighed in over the weekend with his question: 'What can we do to make poverty history?'. At the time of writing Bono had comfortably overtaken Hawking and notched up 28,000 replies. Possibly because Bono has more of a fan base than Hawking or maybe because the answer seems a little easier.

Although the questioners may have trouble finding the time to sift the serious answers from the shrugs of the shoulders, the Yahoo! Answers crowd will do it for him. The standard method on deciding the 'correct' answer is by a vote of the visitors. Of course, this may not mean that the answer decided on is necessarily correct, it just happens to be the most popular. So, the correct answer to 'how do we stop global warming?' might be 'stop using fossil fuels' but it probably would not be the most popular.

Nevertheless, the 'social networking' aspect of Yahoo! Answers is undoubtedly fuelling the growth of the site. Launched at the end of last year, the site was envisaged to build on the community experience Yahoo! already has with other social sites, such as Flickr and del.ic.ious, acquired over the past couple of years.

While Yahoo! Answers cannot guarantee to come up with the right answer, it is certain fostering a debate on these issues - and probably providing a healthy boost to Yahoo!'s traffic as well.