Tomi Poutanen

Rating the Questions on Yahoo! Answers (Download Squad)

Aug 12th 2006 2:35AM Yahoo followed up with a blog posting providing further context to community ratings in Yahoo Answers:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-d8pH0dcoRKeB12yOcnUQp.9VCFos?bid=8650&yy=2006&mm=8&p=8650

We (I'm the director of Yahoo's social search products) are empowering our users to participate in keeping the interactions on Yahoo Answers relevant. Such community rating mechanisms have proven to be incredibly effective in raising content quality in other online settings and, more importantly, in Yahoo's Asian knowledge search services where we have over three years of operating experience.

Our community of loyal Answers users have responded with fervor in rating; see Wednesday's question by John Wuu as an example:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AipIngz7gASBFexdz.YMQ_Hzy6IX?qid=20060809175338AAmYWUn

While initially we only tally the ratings, future product releases will make use of the ratings to give prominence to highly rated questions and answers, and recognize those individuals whose submissions receive positive ratings.

Watch this space!