


The site gave members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation and was based on Naver's Knowledge iN. Yahoo! Answers was created to replace Ask Yahoo!, Yahoo!'s former Q&A platform which was discontinued in March 2006. Yahoo! Answers was finally made available for general availability on May 15, 2006. The beta version Yahoo! Answers was launched to the general public on Decem and was available until May 14, 2006. Yahoo! Answers was launched in mid-2005 for internal alpha testing by Director of Engineering Ofer Shaked. The website began as a search directory for various websites, and soon grew into an established Internet resource that featured the "Yahoo! Answers" platform. The website Yahoo! was officially incorporated on March 2, 1995, and was created by Jerry Yang and David Filo. Logo of the Ask Yahoo! service at the time of its discontinuation in favour of Yahoo! Answers An unaffiliated Japanese version remains online. The URL now redirects to the Yahoo! homepage. The site ceased operations on May 4, 2021. On April 20, 2021, the website switched to read-only and users were no longer able to ask or answer questions. On April 5, 2021, Yahoo! announced that Yahoo! Answers would be shutting down. The number of poorly formed questions and inaccurate answers made the site a target of ridicule. Questions were organised into categories with multiple sub-categories under each to cover every topic users may ask questions on, such as beauty, business, finance, cars, electronics, entertainment, games, gardening, science, news, politics, parenting, pregnancy, and travel. Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. At a time when users online were moving away from traditional message board systems and chat rooms, Yahoo Answers was there - serving as a half-step between the internet communities of the late 1990s and the social media empires that were about to take over the web.May 4, 2021 2 years ago ( ) for all languages except Japanese.

Yahoo Answers wasn't built to compete with any of these networks, but it filled some similar roles. Facebook and Reddit were both still in their infancy, and Twitter was only months away. When it launched in late 2005, it debuted alongside many of today's internet giants. That sense of community is one of the things that made Yahoo Answers interesting. The points and level didn't actually do anything, but it helped create a sense of community. Question askers could pick the best response to any given question, which would help the person writing that answer earn points to level up in an internal ranking system. Although the platform was devised to augment Yahoo's search engine, the site's features helped it find its own weird identity once that searchable trove of knowledge became less of a priority for the company.
