About Yahoo Answers

Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven knowledge market website launched by Yahoo! on December 13, 2005 that allows users to ask questions of other users and answer other users' questions. The site gives members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation and is based on Naver's Knowledge iN. As of December 2006, it has 60 million users and 65 million answers. On June 11, 2007, Yahoo!'s former questions and answers service, Ask Yahoo!, was formally merged with Yahoo! Answers.

Virtually any question is allowed, except ones that violate the Yahoo! Answers [http://answers.yahoo.com/info/community_guidelines.php community guidelines]. To encourage good answers, helpful participants are occasionally featured on the Yahoo! 360° blog page. Though the service itself is free, the content of answers are owned by the respective users—while Yahoo! maintains a non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide right to publish the information. Chat is explicitly forbidden in the Community Guidelines, although users may choose to reveal their Yahoo! Messenger ID on their Answers profile page.

In order to open an account a user needs a Yahoo! ID, but can use any name as identification on Yahoo! Answers. A user can also be represented by a Yahoo! avatar or a Yahoo! 360° picture. When answering a question, a pull-down menu allows one to choose to search either Yahoo! or Wikipedia.