Yahoo!7 Answers Australia

One of Australia’s cute native animals – the quokka

I was fortunate enough over the Easter break to do a little bit of travelling and to appreciate some spectacular parts of what this wide brown land has to offer. I really enjoy holidaying within Australia – I love the breathtaking sights, the smell of native wildflowers and getting up close to the beautiful animals that are unique to this country.

Being such a passionate Aussie, I am often surprised by how little outsiders know about our country, especially since we only have a short history to learn about. Perhaps it is the mystery of ‘Terra Australis’ that attracts so many travellers Down Under each year… travellers who are often inspired by their experiences to change their whole lives and to move here for good. Often immigrants who haven’t had the opportunity to check out Australia first will post a few questions on Yahoo!7 Answers to address any concerns they may have about safety or the environment and to help them make a decision on which part of the nation they are going to settle in.

Life in Australia does take a bit of getting used to, but other than missing a few of the comforts of home (recently a North American friend of mine nearly went mad trying to track down a supply of peanut butter chocolate!) it is more often than not a change for the better.

Clea

We just got word of a creative mash-up using Yahoo! Pipes and the Yahoo!7 Answers API to help surface obscure open questions, so we asked the creator of this pipe to guest blog about his findings. Please welcome Patrick Hunt, Yahoo! Architect to the Answers-verse.
Take it away Patrick…

I don’t work on Answers, nor do I work on Pipes. I’m the lead for a project that integrates del.icio.us bookmarks directly into Firefox. While working on this project I became intimately familiar with the workings of Firefox and the types of problems people encounter. Most of the questions asked about Firefox on Answers are immediately answered – I’m continually amazed at how extremely quick and dynamic this community is. But some questions don’t get answers because they are too tough or not often seen by the community. These are the types of questions I find challenging and enjoy answering.

In order to find these nuggets, I use Answers Search. However my criteria (open, unanswered, Firefox-related questions) is not directly supported. I end up having to search for all open Firefox questions and then paging through the results looking for those with 0 answers. It’s slow going, especially when there are a large number of open questions (most of which have one or more answers already).

Then, I got wind of Yahoo! Pipes, a tool that allows you to take any RSS, massage the content in any number of ways, and look at the results in your favorite RSS reader. I thought, “Hey, maybe I can use Pipes to find these unanswered questions people are asking about Firefox!”

I first looked at the RSS feeds provided by the Answers site, but because of my complex criteria this wouldn’t work for me. Instead, I headed over to Yahoo! Developer Network, where Answers has an open search API that outputs RSS. Sweet! I created a new application id, figured out the parameters I wanted to input to the search API, and went over to the Pipes site where I created a pipe.

You’ll see that I set the pipe up to allow any query to be executed. You can search for Firefox, Yahoo, kittens, or whatever else piques your interest. The output provides a “Get as RSS” link. Add this to your favorite RSS reader such as MyYahoo!7 (you can click on the RSS link if you use Firefox) and you’re off to the races.

If you have an issue with Firefox, post a question and maybe I’ll answer it!

Patrick
Yahoo! Architect