Yahoo!7 Answers Australia

We are happy to announce that we’ve made some tweaks to our flash badge to make it work on Myspace and Yahoo!7 360.

Regular Answers users will have probably already noticed and been dismayed by the fact that sometimes Answers receives “noise” in the form of abusive, nonsensical

If you were to drive down the main streets of Australia’s capital cities at 4.30am, you could have thought that it was 4.30 in the afternoon. You couldn’t get a taxi, public transport was busy and there were loads of people walking around. Two hours later, fans had claimed the street!

We are seeing more and more Australian users on Yahoo!7 Answers every day – which is fantastic! – so we wanted to give everyone, especially the newcomers, a few tips about how to get better answers for your important questions.

It may sound blatantly obvious, but well-written, thoughtful questions tend to receive well-written, thoughtful answers.

An example of a GOOD question: What should Australian teams do when the Kiwis are doing their haka? Make fun of it or show respect? Notice that the responses tend to be written clearly, in a friendly, helpful tone, with great perfect spelling and punctuation.

An example of a BAD question is: if i like a girl ho do i know if she likes me that way? There was only one answer (which was thankfully polite) and I think it was very lucky to get that.

When you look at similar poorly written questions, you’ll notice that the answers are often equally baffling and incoherent. They may be legitimate questions but because they are very generalised, or with poor spelling and grammar, they are almost destined to generate poorly-written answers or none at all. Don’t forget that there’s a spell-checker just above the box where you type your question so take a few extra seconds to make sure your question is clear and understandable.

If you’re on the hunt for quality answers in a particular category, you can access them quickly and easily with the sort feature. Just choose a category, click on More Resolved Questions (see pic above), and click on the Community Rating link (arrow-down means best to worst) and you’ll get the questions that other Answers users found the most useful.

And don’t forget, you play a key part in choosing best answers and giving the best answers more prominence, so remember to cast your votes and rate the best answers. You will pick up 3 points just for doing it.

If you want to see an example of a brilliant answerer, check out morgan (no, he’s not an Aussie but we won’t hold that against him), who has managed to have an incredible 85% of his answers judged as Best Answer. Wow!

Hola…Salut…Ola…Ciao…Tag…Hi!

You have probably noticed that there is a whole bunch of flags at the bottom of the Yahoo!7 Answers page. We just wanted to let you know that they have nothing to do with celebrating the FIFA World Cup! This week the Answers family grew even more, with the addition of sites across the globe and in different languages. Lesley from our US office sums up these additions so well we wanted to share her thoughts with you all:

Hi, everyone!

Many of our users have been wondering when Yahoo! Answers would be available in Spanish, French, and other languages.

Well….ask and ye shall receive! In our on-going quest for world domination, the team is excited to announce that as of Monday evening PST, Yahoo! Answers is officially multilingual. We’ve expanded our international presence to NINE additional markets and in FIVE new languages. In addition to our existing sites in AU, US, UK, CA, and IN, we now have Yahoo! Answers in: Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Telemundo, and Singapore.

Please extend a warm welcome to the latest additions to the Yahoo! Answers community. Now you’ve got more places to bust out your foreign language skills, ask your questions and share your knowledge globally: Find out from Germans whether it’s still possible to get tickets for the FIFA World Cup or take a look at the French site to find out what their recommendations are for a good mid-range Bordeaux. 

We ask that in utilizing these international sites, you post in the language of the site (e.g. German questions on the German site) and answer in the language of the original question. Otherwise, until we get some nice translation technology in there, it could get rather confusing for both askers and answerers alike.

We’re so excited to share Yahoo! Answers with even more of the world–we’re just starting out in those markets so please help us spread the Yamster love and keep that feedback coming!

Lesley – International Yahoo! Answers

If you know another language check it out and let us know what you think. Perhaps the new Answers sites will help you with your language studies!

Alana

If you’ve been cruising the wonderful world of Answers recently, especially the US site, you might have seen signs for the ‘Ask the Planet‘ promotion. What’s it all about? Good question…

Ask the Planet is a US-based Answers promotion where each weekday for the next few weeks a new category will be featured, and each one will be accompanied by a question asked by a notable celebrity, expert, or even a featured user. Some of the notable questioners over the next three weeks include Donald Trump, Al Gore, Stephen Hawking and Bono. The best answerer in the category of the day gets one entry for a chance to win the prize for the day. Prizes include 3 ounces of gold, a plasma HDTV, a Toyota hybrid car, massages for a year and cold hard cash.

How can you win one of these great prizes? Unfortunately for Australian Yahoo!7 Answers users, even if you wrote the best possible answer to one of the Ask the Planet questions, you won’t pick up a prize. With a global product like Yahoo! Answers, promotions such as these can be frustrating because in this case we are prohibited by law from giving away prizes to anyone outside of the U.S. This doesn’t mean that all future promotions will always start and end with the U.S. Think of this as our first attempt at trying to Ask the Planet … in baby steps. Canada is also running a modified Ask the Planet promotion, and of course here in Australia we have started our search for the biggest unanswered question of them all. You can add your answer here.

So while prizes may be out of reach this time around, Ask the Planet will still provide some highly interesting questions and answers. Take a look at the first Ask the Planet featured question from Marilyn vos Savant, which has so far received over 8,600 answers (and they’re still coming in!), and keep checking the Yahoo!7 Answers blog for more exciting promotions a little further down the track.

Stuart

Is “flashing” an acceptable online activity? It is when you’re showing off your Answers badge! We’ve had an Answers badge for a while, but it doesn’t work on many of the most popular web sites. So, to make things easier, we’ve created a new badge using Flash technology.

By cutting and pasting a bit of code, you’ll be able to put your badge on lots of different web sites. We’ve even created a great

The Answers resurrection last week had a few wrinkles in it, and the Yamsters have been burning the midnight oil getting things sorted out. I’m happy to say that you should now see some big improvements in the way things are working. Of course, we’re very sorry about the issues, and a big Thank You goes out to the users for their help and feedback. Without further ado, the fixes are:

Advanced search: We saw that there were problems with Advanced search and they’ve now been fixed. You should be able to search by open or voting questions again.

Question sorting on browse pages: Now the sorting should work properly again in the redesigned pages.

Missing best answer emails: Best answer emails are once again being sent, so you’ll know right away when someone thinks you have a great answer.

Slow abuse reporting: Some of you have noticed that the “Report Abuse” function worked slowly or not at all. This should be solved now, so please use it when you see instances of abuse- it helps out our team a lot to get your feedback.

We can’t squash all the bugs, but with your help, we can figure out which ones to kill first. There’s link to the forum on the top of every page in Answers. Feedback on what you like and don’t like is incredibly valuable, because we’re building the site for all of you, our users. Thanks again for being understanding.

PS- Forgot to mention one more thing:
No Best Answer: Votes for No Best Answer no longer result in any points for the voter.

Nick Nguyen Product Manager, Yahoo! Answers (US)

The Yahoo!7 Answers Team is seeking the 10 greatest unanswered questions of all time. We are looking for everything from simple unknowns to the timeless mysteries that have plagued mankind for all time.

From the questions Curious Isaac receives as answers YOU get to choose the 10 biggest unanswered questions of all time.  To keep track of all the new answers and the voting status you can add this question to your watchlist.

Stay tuned to the blog for more details in the near future.

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

How can I possibly sleep after such an exciting game? 3 goals in less than 10 minutes makes for great television viewing. Of course, it wouldn’t be a real football game without some theatrics, but were the Japanese laying it on a little too thick?

Having seen football games in Maracana in Brazil and La Bombonera in Argentina, I could only imagine how electric the atmosphere would have been in the stadium for all the Socceroos fans. Back at home, it didn’t take long for the questions to appear on Yahoo!7 Answers. Within minutes of the game finishing, questions and answers had already appeared:

How did Guus Hiddink manage to get the Socceroos in such good shape in such a short time?
Did Japan show too much arrogance?
What does the win against Japan mean for the Socceroos?

There have been many questions on the Socceroos since they qualified to play in the 2006 FIFA World Cup (TM), ranging from questions on basic football rules, to  obscure trivia questions. If you sift through the questions on “Who is going to win the World Cup”, you will find some great questions and answers. We really liked the questions from El Gringo who asked some tough trivia questions:

Which players have played for more than one country in the World Cup?
What is the most expensive piece of WC memorabilia and how much was it sold for?
What are the names of all the WC mascots since the first in 1966?
Who are the only two players who played in the WC either side of World War II?
Who are the only two WC players who have also managed their teams?

Australia’s win against Japan tonight made me think of a question I saw a few months ago that hasn’t been answered yet, so if you do know, it would be great to hear from you through a 360 comment:

Who made the big sign at the Socceroos WC qualifier that said “I Told You So”?

May the best team win!

Alana