no.stupid.answers

Check this out: Answers.com, along with other popular information destinations, is listed as a featured search option on Soovle.com. Soovle is described as “An engine that provides the suggestion services from all the major providers in one place.”

You can pick your preferred search destination by clicking its logo. For instance, click the Answers.com logo and it’ll be carried over to the search bar. Then you can just enter your search term and voila!

There are several ways to search and there is also the possibility of “saving suggestions” for later. And for the curious among us, you can snoop around the top keyword searches and find out what others are tracking.

I know that yesterday I brought up a brand new feature on WikiAnswers - the Community Forum - but it seems there’s another new feature live, which, in my opinion, is just as cool.

Now when you do a search on WikiAnswers, your results come up with… snippets! Snippets are the first bits of text that are part of the greater answer. When you can see the snippet, you can get a quicker feel for whether an answer is correct, inappropriate, etc.

As one colleague said, this is going to further bring out the WikiAnswers-brand OCD in all of us.

Try to do a search now - type any topic into the advanced search bar and enjoy!

Search on WikiAnswers is now better than ever, but it can still be difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for. Here are some useful search tips from one of our local gurus. The words in double quotes are your search terms — what you type into the search box.

Typing:

“new car”

will search for the exact match of the whole string “new car” (like Google does)…

Next:

“new” “car”

will search for any question that contains both “new” AND “car” (regardless of whether they appear next to each other or in that order), but any question that contains only one of these words will not be in the results list…

You can combine this search with a some kind of OR-based search… For example:

“general motors” vehicle

will search for the whole string “general motors” and also for the word “vehicle”. Results that contain the word “vehicle” will come first, but if the word “vehicle” is not found, you’ll still see results for “general motors”…

And this query is more complicated:

“car” “ford” new

It will search for the questions that contain both “car” and “ford” and may also contain the word “new”. Results that contain the word “new” will come first, but if the word “new” is not found, you’ll still see results for “car” AND “ford”…

And of course you can use the old OR-based search just by typing:

new car

And this will give you all the questions with at least one of the words (while the questions that contain BOTH words will come first in the list).

So, in short: putting a word or a search term into quotes makes the search term mandatory, while any unquoted word stays optional (but the results containing the most optional words will come first in the search results list)…

That’s all Happy searching!

Now it’s even easier to search on WikiAnswers.

Let’s say you did a search for questions about gerbils… you would get a page like this, with a little line of text at the top:

Use this little tool to filter the results right here on the page, without doing a new search from scratch. For instance…

Limit your search to questions in the Gerbils category:

A little window will pop up so you can choose which categories to search in:

Choose whether you want to see answered, unanswered or all questions:

Done looking at questions about gerbils in general? Time to look up something more specific. Look up “food” instead - your results will still be from the Gerbils category.

And of course, you can always click on New Search or Advanced Search to start from scratch!

Happy searching!

Hooray for new things! While all you dads out there are tearing open envelopes and ripping up wrapping paper, we’re having a blast with the bubble wrap on this brand new baby:

The WikiAnswers Ask/Answer bar has a whole new look, same great taste. Or something… Last time I licked my monitor, it was for that new Starburst flavor, except it didn’t taste like Awesome Berry, it tasted more like LCD, which I thought was illegal, anyway.

WikiAnswers got a big fat biographical interview yesterday on AltSearchEngines, a blog covering the growing search engine scene.

While I might characterize WikiAnswers as less a search engine and more a directory of Q&A, there is a strong aspect of search that has been improved in recent weeks.

One of the unique things about WikiAnswers is that it utilizes the wiki format, creating a new page for every new question - unless the question is asked again, in which case you’ll get directed to the existing page. From there you can get the answer and add on to it if you know any more information.

Using smart language technology, the site searches its listing of Q&A to find questions that closely match what you’ve asked. If there is no exact match (which might even be the same question in different words) then you get a list of close matches. You can choose one of them as your question or ask your question separately.

So perhaps WikiAnswers may be viewed as a search engine of sorts - a self-growing search engine, that can only get better and better as you ask and answer more and more questions.

Answers.com is a Webware 100 finalist for it’s 2008 awards. Crenk.com decided to predict who the Webware 100 will include in this year’s list of sites, and - yay! - Answers.com made it there, in the Search & Reference category.

So I guess that means it’s settled, then. Answers.com will win a place in the top 100… but not without your help:

Vote for Answers.com here!