2/12/08 - Featured Company: Answerbag
Web Site: www.answerbag.com
Headquarters: Santa Monica, Calif.
Year Founded: 2003
Founder: Joel Downs
Investors: *Answerbag is owned by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand Media, which acquired the company in 2006.
Company News: www.demandmedia.com/news-media.asp
By Joel Downs, Founder and CEO
What is Answerbag?
Answerbag.com is more than a leading, independent social knowledge platform and online destination. To the many users, Answerbag is a community of people helping others. Users can ask questions, share answers and collaboratively evaluate information, while building a permanent archive of knowledge and experience. Other sites that share the Answerbag platform—bloggers, web publishers, etc.—leverage the company’s knowledge platform to provide live, social Q&A to their audiences. Answerbag’s mission is to help people find and share knowledge.
As of February 2008, Answerbag has 236,000 registered members who have asked more than 500,000 questions. The site receives over 10,000 answers per day (totaling 2.1 million answers to date since the site’s creation) that are provided in response to the 1,500 daily questions that are received across 6,000 categories. Additionally, Answerbag serves Q&A to 5-and-a-half million unique visitors per month.
What is Social Q&A, and How is Answerbag Different?
As the Internet continues to expand into billions of pages, search tools such as Google and Yahoo! are showing their limitations. For a typical search, they may return hundreds of thousands of results, but they are not useful in helping people find opinions, in evaluating the information they find, and they do not let people ask questions about the information they find. Social Q&A has evolved in order to fill this gap. Using Social Q&A, individuals can ask questions of each other using plain English, they can share answers and as a group they can evaluate the answers and decide which are best. Almost 90 percent of questions are answered within one hour or less.