Yahoo! Canada Answers Blog

To continuing improving your Yahoo! Answers experience we have introduced a few small changes this week…

Changing time to choose a Best Answer

Based on your feedback to be able to resolve a question quicker, we have now reduced the wait time to choose a best answer from 4 hours to 1 hour. If you now receive multiple responses within an hour you can select one of those as your Best Answer, or choose to put the question to vote at this earlier stage.

The full lifecycle of a question won’t change – questions will still be open for 4 days and up to maximum of 8 days if you extend the expiration. This change gives you the option to resolve earlier or put to vote earlier. If you take no action to resolve or extend the question, the question will automatically go to vote for the Best Answer.

Optional Preview screen when answering questions

Many of you have commented that to you’d prefer an answering experience without having to see your response on the Preview page first. We are now able to offer this…

If you are signed-in with your Answers account and have answered at least one question before then when submitting your answer you can choose to Submit your response immediately without going to the Preview page first. We’ve kept the Preview page too, so you can still see how your response will look before publishing it.

What makes Yahoo! Answers unique is the avid involvement of the community it is YOU that provides the content so continue to ask, answer and vote!

Following last week’s changes to Search and the Fans/Contacts system we now have a few more changes to share with you…

Edit My Preferences page

To keep public information and your personal settings separate we’ve made further changes on the `Edit my preferences` pages.

As with the previous preference page you can still add your photo or avatar from here or change your screen name which will both be used across your Yahoo! experience.  We’ve made this page a little lighter to view by splitting out how you will be seen on Answers from your personal preferences on Privacy and Communications.

The Privacy and Communications tab gives you control to receive specific notifications such as when `someone becomes your fan` or when `there are new questions for My Saved Searches` – and whether you allow fans at all.

Hiding your profile

You may notice there is no longer the option to choose whether you `Show link to my Profile Page`.  This previously controlled whether you linked directly to your Pulse profile on Yahoo!

This setting is now controlled across all Yahoo! properties from `Settings`–> `Privacy` and the `Manage Privacy Settings` page on Yahoo! Pulse.

This year, Yahoo! Answers Canada has seen its fair share of questions and answers—you’ve covered everything under the sun—from questions about current events such as “balloon boy” to Michael Jackson’s death to everyday questions about culture to tackling tough questions about the economy and unemployment.

We’ve gone through some of the best (and quirkiest) content on Answers to create this year’s highlight book. This year’s e-book contains 12 questions from Answers users, just like you, that showcase some of the unique questions and answers you’ll find on Yahoo! Answers- as well as a few outstanding community members you might come across while perusing the site.

So view the book 2009 Highlights (3406) and explore some of the content found on Answers (this will prompt you to download a small PDF file).

Download the e-book here: 2009 Highlights (3406)

Great news! Since we launched Yahoo! Answers, over 1 billion questions and answers have been posted from across the world. It’s a huge number but the way we see it, it’ s a true testimony of how great of a community-driven knowledge website Answers is.

Did you know that:
•    The Answers community counts over 179 million users. That’s more than half the population in the United States!
•    Yahoo! Answers is available in 26 markets and is translated in 12 languages. From English to Japanese, we’ve got you covered!
•    Every day, an average  of 15 million users visit the site. That’s how many people visit Disneyland every year!

As we strive to make Answers the best source to find and share information, we always take your feedback into account and greatly appreciate your efforts in helping us fight abuse. Remember to regularly visit our blog for announcements and advice on how to make the best out of Answers. We thank all of you for helping us reach that landmark.

How can we improve your experience on Answers?

Flickr photo by Eszter

We’ve been so busy, we almost forgot it’s our birthday! Two years ago in June, curious Canadians found a place to get all their questions answered, and we have definitely come a long way since our humble beginnings. As I write this, we have nearly 650,000 closed questions on Yahoo! Canada Answers — hopefully we can get to a million before our next b-day. So keep on voting!

We have made some great friends on our top contributors board over the past two years. Our number 1 contributor in Canada, bgee2001ca, has over 6,000 Best Answers and can help you get up to date on anything you need to know aboutnews and current events. The rest of our TC’s are experts in everything from dogs to cooking to video games. Their expertise is what has made Yahoo! Canada Answers such a great place to be. I love knowing I can get useful info about everything from buying a new computer to caring for my kitten quickly here.

We’ve also made some great friends in our celebrity Askers. We’ve been proud to work with some awesome well-known Canadian faces over the past year, including The Hour host George Stroumboulopoulos, music historian Alan Cross, Kids in the Hall alum Scott Thompson and Barenaked Ladies lead singer Steven Page.

Although Yahoo! Canada Answers is in its “terrible twos” now, we promise not to throw tantrums — although we may need the odd nap or time-out from time to time, in order to make improvements and implement new features that we hope you’ll enjoy. Stay tuned!

Thank you to all our Askers and Answerers for being with us over the past two years!