Get real answers from real people

I’m trying to remember how we used to do things before the Internet came along. I wrote letters by hand, put them in envelopes, bought stamps, and dropped them at the post office. For research, I went to the school’s library or asked my dad. To keep in touch with friends, we burned the phone lines or met up in homes or malls. If we needed something, we asked around or borrowed, or went to stores hoping to find it.

Nowadays, all of these can be done at home. The Internet has so much to offer, I can spend six hours straight online if I don’t watch it. I can e-mail, research, chat, meet friends and shop online, and all these can be done on yahoo.com. Now I can even ask questions my dad can’t answer through Yahoo!’s latest offering.

Yahoo! recently flew members of the Philippine media to Kuala Lumpur to introduce Yahoo! Answers. I was there for less than 24 hours, and I loved it. I’ve been wanting to visit Malaysia ever since my friends went and said the Malaysians have come a long way (read: we are so far behind). "Airport pa lang, malulula ka na," they said.

They were right. The airport was amazing, modern, high-tech. From there, we took a train to the city and ended up at the Mandarin Oriental Kuala Lumpur where the presentation started as soon as we arrived.

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy for Yahoo!, was there to tell us about Yahoo! Answers, which they have launched so far in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Yahoo! Answers is an online community where people ask each other questions on any topic and get answers from people around the world, sharing knowledge in the form of facts, opinions and personal experiences.

To illustrate how Yahoo! Answers helps, before I left for Singapore, I went to the site to see if it would be worth taking my broken iBook for repair. Two minutes after I posted the question, somebody sent me a link to a Mac site that listed authorized repair shops in Singapore.

I e-mailed all seven shops to quote me on the price of a new logic board. The following day, three of them e-mailed back and I concluded that the cost was too expensive and the iBook not worth repairing.

Yahoo! Answers saved me the effort of taking the iBook to Singapore and looking for shops there.

What makes Yahoo! Answers convenient is that it’s a regionalized forum, so people in the Philippines, for example, can answer questions directed to Filipinos.

To encourage people to participate, Yahoo! Answers has an incentive structure that gives out points to users who sign up (100 points), which they can use to ask questions (it will cost you five points to ask.), but which they can gain them back by answering questions (two points).

Horowitz said some people actually get addicted to the points system and spend time just answering questions. "It’s an amazing phenomenon," he said. "You have people in the system that are experts on everything from automobiles to history to cultural questions, and they lurk in these categories and answer these questions as an act of tremendous generosity. It’s a culture of generosity of people that are there really to just help other people."

Currently, some of the questions on the Philippines look like this:

How to Avoid Personal Questions in the Philippines?

"I like the friendliness of the Filipino people, but sometimes when I travel there they ask all sorts of very personal questions, for example: ‘Where did you meet your girlfriend, what is your nationality, what is your last name, why are you not married and when are you getting married, why are you in the Philippines and what are you going to do in Manila?’

"These are asked by complete strangers whom I have met only a minute ago. I do not feel like disclosing all this personal information about myself to people I don’t know, but I also do not want to be disrespectful and anger people. Is there a polite way to decline answering inquiries in such interrogations?"

The question has already received 20 answers ranging from the "Filipinos are nosy" (which I tend to agree) to "It may sound like they are intruding on your personal life but they are just being friendly and trying to make conversation."

There are quite a few girls worried at three in the morning and asking if they could be pregnant if they had sex during their period.

Someone else wants to know: "What’s the name of the song used in WoWoWee for the new dance The Do? And anyone know the lyrics?"

Just now I posted a question asking where to buy sweet longganisa in Metro Manila.

Two minutes later, I received an "answer," rather a spam/link from a biker dude looking for a Filipina date. So I pressed the "abuse" button.

To deal with spammers and abusers, Yahoo! has placed a "Report abuse" button so that users themselves can police the site.

Ten minutes later, I did get a good answer from someone who suggested a couple of places to buy longganisa, including "try to get it from Ilocos if you can."

I wish Yahoo! would add a button that says "Report a silly question" or "Report to grammar police."

One recent question reads: "My dog play his poo?

"He always carry it here and there, sometimes put it on his bed.

"Of course I clean his face and mouth after he plays it.

"I clean it up and scold him, but next time he does the same thing."

Six people bothered to answer, one of whom said, "Well, my dog eats other dogs poos then vomits them back up so consider yourself lucky."

The real answer, a dog expert says is "some dogs eat their poop because to them it smells like the food they just ate. As all dog lovers know, dogs poop about 30 minutes after they eat, and they don’t chew, they just swallow. So a responsible pet owner should clean up after the dog right away."

So how does Yahoo! make sure the answers are accurate?

Horowitz says, "We don’t. The community does. The responsibility of assessing the accuracy of the answers goes back to the users. And the beautiful thing is, people do that. People come in and say, ‘that was a great answer, this really served me, this is really valuable.’"

To participate and see more questions on the Philippines, go to www.yahoo.com.ph and click on "Answers."