Fixing a Dripping Faucet - Or Why You Should Participate in Yahoo! Answers

Posted on March 29, 2007
Filed Under Yahoo! |

During my today’s visit on Yahoo! Answers - I try to answer two open questions a day – I found the following:

“What is the term I need to look up in the Yellow Pages if I want a dripping faucet to be fixed?”

There were 12 helpful answers in the first hour; unfortunately nobody pasted a link to Yahoo Local! but let’s just assume the user came from there and went back there afterwards.

can’t find it? Ask for it!

This is great! It’s like a blueprint of the real world. You do have a problem but don’t exactly know what to look for to find a solution. You will ask your friends and family to give you some advice or even to help you out.

Back in ’99 my Boss at Bosch said to me.

“Listen Frank, one day we need to be at a level of providing service through the internet that an users types in something like:

“I want to hang a picture on the wall” and we – Bosch – ask a couple of multiple choice questions to figure out what is the best approach and then propose a set of tools and items like a hammer and a nail for a small frame or a percussion drill, anchors and screws for a heavy one.”

Very valid idea – but however we are not quite there yet with today’s search tools at least not on a large scale. Well a trained geek will get to the information after – an hour or so – maybe - but in the meantime I could have gone to “Bill’s Builders” round the corner and well Bill knows his stuff…

Even with extensive key word tagging on business profiles or very long descriptions of the services offered by a certain company or business you will very likely never ever get to a point where you could scale this to a level that will be fine for XX million businesses. So either plumber Joe needs to learn how to find the right keywords quickly – we all know that’s unlikely to happen soon - Or we stick to the good old ask the pro approach.

“A cobbler should stick to his last.”

Yahoo! Answers: 10 million strong and growing On Answers you will find people with all sorts of needs – needs for information, needs for services and maybe even needs for products. If you do have the information, know where to get the best service or the best product for the best price - go tell the community!

Have an idea for a good Restaurant in San Francisco for a fab Hotel in New York or a great Health Insurance Broker? Share it…

If you participate on a regular basis, add value to the community, get a respected member and build up a reputation – the internet is best when it is a blue print of the offline world – you will benefit. Sounds like work - well I’m afraid it is.

You can easily monitor the topics of your interest & area through subscribing to the xml feeds available - look at the bottom of the pages. Just add them to your feed reader and you are all set.