Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Battle of the giants of the web for the "perfect answer"

NEW YORK - "The correct answer is ....". What exactly would you give to answer precisely this question? An investment bank on Wall Street, Benchmark Capital, has offered a record $ 11 million. "Eleven million of financing in their flight to $ 86 million market value of Quore, the site specializes in online questions and answers, or the latest phenomenon of the web.

You say, but the questions are not already at the heart of research on Internet? You go to Google and type in what you are looking for. To be seen, therefore, serve to stratospheric speeds than a quarter of a second that is less than half of what they take to blink. In short, yes, right, that's a correct answer .

But what the Americans call "Q & A" sites "Questions and Answers", that is the question and answer, are another matter. They are the sites that try to answer every question really chasing the perfect answer. He says for example New York Times Sposky Joel, one of the founders of Stack Exchange: "You can read an entire Wikipedia page on Egypt but remain unanswered about a particular fact that is happening." But as you build the perfect answer? What kind of question: depends, first, by the question.

That's why the market for Q & A date had not yet developed its full possibilities. Surfing the web you will sometimes come across sites such as WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers. Giants 50 million traffic. But you will sometimes clashed with the banality of the questions and subsequent answers.

And what the media expert Ron Callari called "dummy down": the tendency to trivialize a service that is making him lose appeal - especially commercial. So the search for the perfect answer led to two types of counter-offensive. On the one hand specialization: Stack Exchange, for example, was created to respond to issues raised in the community of programmers, then it is open to discussions about photography and has now evolved to collect 41 fields of investigation.

Across the use of the concept behind the web revolution: that of community. The answer that comes within the communities - from Facebook to Twitter - is more credible because it is more reliable: so Quore calls just to register an account with one of the two most popular social forum. What a coincidence: one of its founders, Charlie Cheever, comes from Facebook.

The two trends - specialization and community - among other things, share another characteristic: the response "signed". Who offers a solution must be patented: so the answer is worth more. Apart, of course, the value of the application. That can only be curious and also: "What are the words that appear more frequently in the New York Times crossword puzzle?".

But if the answer to which gains in value - as it does on Quore - is signed by one of the most famous authors of the puzzle: Neville Fogarty (for the record: the word is "was"). The phenomenon is on the rise so that Facebook has announced it will launch a service in a very short ad hoc content are top secret for the moment and it should work in the U.S.

alone. Just enough to unleash a war of applications on the Web. Google is doing taxi engines "Google Squared": "An aggregator of information still in the testing" to confirm the Republic "that provides all the knowledge on a specific topic on the web: aggregation in a grid that you can customize it to suit your questions.

" While Microsoft, for now, remember that "Bing has been designed just as a search engine capable of sensing the demand of the Navigator": becoming part in the race. Because in the game, of course, there is only knowledge. But, like any self-respecting Rischiatutto, even a lot of money.

"A site that reveals the most searched questions from someone obviously reveals a lot about the kind of user," says Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research "becoming appetibilissimo for advertisers." And the vampires of Wall Street: that instead of being so many questions have already jumped on the business.

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