In December I wrote about Yahoo Answers and noted some of the early zits, but overall was impressed with the movement to get human input factored into traditional search engine results.

In the title by ‘begins’ I mean that in the roughest sense of the word. From the Yahoo blog:

Do a search on Yahoo! and you’ll see how questions and answers are being surfaced within results. Every day, someone out there has a question, and someone out there knows the answer and gives it for free. Just because helping someone by sharing what you know is a reward in itself.

I did some searches on random questions like:

Who wrote the Da Vinci Code? At the very bottom there is a link saying to check Yahoo Answers, but clicking the link doesn’t prefill the query, it takes me to a main Answers area which requires me reinputting the query to get to the answer of Dan Brown. Integrated would transfer my query from form to form, but it doesn’t even seem to do that.

An earlier entry this morning hit on the problems of spam, so I asked: how to stop spam? You’ll note by the screenshot at the top of this post this yields ad pitches to buy anti-spam software. Again, no Y! Answers integration? Why not at least show a link to the 258 search results from Answers for easy clickthru by the person running the query?

Somebody let us know when they really start integrating Yahoo Answers into their searches. Yeah, they provide a token example, but how many different type searches does one have to run to actually see the results? They could have easily done the things I mentioned above with little additional programming. Instead, it seems like they are taking advantage of the 10 million answers number to get people to take another look at their ads, er, I mean search results.

I strongly believe human-involved blending of results will be the future of search. Machine algos can only go so far, at least until more progress in artificial intelligence is done. I continue to look forward to when these options really start making a difference with questions in our search results, including what Yahoo can do with their existing Answers. Beyond screenshots, I haven’t spent much time with Microsoft’s QnA approach yet. I like what Google is doing with the subscibed links and co-op area. (Disclaimer: I own Google and Yahoo stock).

Come on Yahoo, hurry up and get at least the basic query transfers coded over so your users aren’t forced to type the same thing again or use third party programs like Greasemonkey to do the job.

• Google fares better than Yahoo and MSN in Trivial Pursuit challenge
• Google puts brakes on Google Answers
• Google’s Page to graduation class: “Save your world by building your dreams.”
• Yahoo blog search hide and don’t seek yet
• Yahoo Answers easier than asking the questions
• Artificial Intelligence search “working beta” too dumb to find any search results, but it has a patent pending?