The Q&A Search Engine

To find the right answers to your questions, you need to know and trust the place you're getting your answers from. If you're given the wrong answer, then you're no better off than when you started. There are, however, places that may be found on the Internet that offer both the right answers to your questions and get them answered quickly. A community of experts from various fields join together to help enlighten people by sharing their knowledge answering questions. Sometimes the answer to your question has already been submitted and there is no wait time the answer is already there, other times you may need to wait a few minutes (or days) to get your answer.

Some of the more well-known Questions and Answers (Q&A) websites out there are Yahoo! Answers, Answers.com, and Ask.com. These websites are known and trusted and all work in different ways to answer people's questions. Some, like Ask combine both community-answered questions and searched and indexed questions, and their respective answers, (much like a search engine) found from various sources including Answers.com, et al. The latter could be called a Q&A Search Engine.

When we compare this to a website like Yahoo! Answers they differ, in that the answers are primarily driven by a community of people submitting answers. There are contributors that are experts and have, or are affiliated to, or work for, companies that do business in the same field as the questions being answered. These types of community contributors of answers are found to be the best since they are experienced in their fields already and simply share their knowledge. Keep in mind, however, that there are also answers that are submitted that are from ordinary people that also know the answer to a given question that submit, but this is also not to say that their answers are wrong.

One way to know if the answer is trustworthy or not is to view who submitted the answer by viewing the user profile and see if they are a trustworthy source. This can be done by viewing some other questions that were submitted by the user, viewing their profile can also give you some insight on the person behind the username, sometimes the Q&A website also keeps track with points (that add or subtract based on people's votes) and, generally, the larger the point score the more the user can be trusted.