Answerbag is a question & answer service similar to Yahoo! Answers that allows members to ask and answer questions on virtually any topic. Answerbag is owned by Infosearch Media, who is a fairly significant player in the SEM space. Infosearch’s primary area of focus is the generation of unique, search engine friendly content for Web sites.
The Answerbag widget extends this question and answer service to blogs and other sites that accept scripts. The content displayed in these widgets can be filtered by category, so that a site about consumer electronics can display only questions and answers related to electronics.
Applications & Opportunity
The Q&A space has been getting a lot of buzz recently, driven primarily by the early success of Yahoo! Answers. Indeed, each of the big three now has a horse in this race with Microsoft Live QNA and Google Answers joining Yahoo! Answers (although GA has a slightly different model). The earliest player that I’m aware of in this space is a site called Wondir.
So why are Q&A sites getting so much attention? Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz writes eloquently about the ability for Q&A sites to provide answers to questions that may not even be on the Web yet. Search engines are great for stuff that is out there, but if the answer that you are looking for doesn’t exist on a crawlable Web page, you’re out of luck.
One other reason that I think this sort of service has some potential is due to the fact that the workload is shared among multiple publishers (unlike most blogs) and the publisher has the ability to write about any theme (unlike most ratings / review sites).
As far as the opportunities for a widgetized extension of this sort of service, it’s tough to tell. My guess is that a lot of community Web sites that are powered entirely by the contributions of their members might be leery of going out of their way to drive those members to another destination site community. A complementary service, like a blog, may be more likely to want to engage their user base with interactive content, with the knowledge that their readers most likely won’t get the same experience that they offer at the Answerbag destination site.
I do think that a version of this widget branded to the publisher might have some legs. Existing online communities would probably be more willing to tap into Answerbag’s content and platform should their brand experience be preserved.
Clearly, the potential market for this type of service is pretty broad, and pretty mainstream. Everybody has some questions and some answers. This is not a new behavior. It’s just a matter of making it so Answerbag is one of the vehicles that folks choose to express their questions and answers.
Configuration
The Answerbag widget is featured prominently on the site’s home page. According to this Techcrunch review, widgets and open APIs are a huge part of Answerbag’s strategy to hang in there against the Big Three.
Clicking the widget link on the home page takes you to a widget overview page that provides screenshots, highlights the value of the service, and explains how the widget works. From there, you launch the widget configuration tool.
There are four different customization options provided by the Answerbag tool; what components you would like to include in your widget (just questions, questions & answers, etc.), what categories or keyword you would like to filter content by, how many questions you would like to display, and how you would like to sort those questions. There’s also a preview tool that shows you what your widget will look like in real time, as you mess with the configuration options. There’s no option to change the width, but it’s easy enough to go into the CSS and adjust it.
You don’t have to be registered to configure a widget (though you do have to be registered to participate in questions and answers.)
Overall, I found the Answerbag’s widget configuration tool to be easy to find, easy to use, and very intuitive. Because it seems to be targeted at blogs who would most likely put the widget in the sidebar, I think it would probably make sense to people define the width via the tool as opposed to going into the code.
Testing
I had no problems adding this widget to a Blogger sidebar, or to Typepad. On Blogger, it was sort of a pain to post the widget into the sidebar, and then find the block of code in the template in order adjust the width. I guess I could have used a text editor, but again, why not make it easy for those even less skilled than me by including the width in the configuration tool?
I also tried submitting a question via the widget, and I was immediately taken to the Answerbag site in order to register. I understand exactly why this is required, but it may be an obstacle to adoption for both blog publisher and widget participant. I also did not get an email confirmation message from the site, and it was not immediately clear who I should contact to deal with this.
Editorial
There are a few things that I really like about this widget. I really like that it’s a widget that solicits content. A big empty question field is a lot more inviting than a link that says “click here to ask a question.” I also really like the airplay that Answerbag gives to its widget on its site, and the fact that there is one centralized page on Answerbag.com that allows you to configure any widget (as opposed to having to browse through the site to find the right widget.
The filtering option is very cool as well. If you flash forward to a time when Answerbag has a ton of content and a ton of activity, it’s conceivable that they might be able to provide a thematically relevant widget to virtually any site.
However, my sense is that if Answerbag really believes that this widget (plus an open API) will cause them to overtake Yahoo! Answers, I’d have to say that I’m a little skeptical. There is nothing defendable about this widget. If it really turns out to be a difference maker, there is no reason that Yahoo! Answers couldn’t just copy it and push it on their massive user base.
One note on Answerbag’s prospects for survival against the big three: Answerbag is owned by Infosearch Media, who has made a killing on providing unique, thematically relevant content to webmasters looking to rank better in search engines. I don’t think Answerbag should be evaluated based on whether they can somehow defeat the Big Three’s Q&A plays – it should be evaluated based on how efficient it is in generating content for Infosearch’s webmaster clients. And in that respect, I’d say its prospects are very good.
So just to sum up my thoughts on the Answerbag widget – it’s very well executed, and could potentially be a useful tool for site owners to add an interactive component to their Web sites. I don’t think online communities will be implementing this any time soon (for the reasons mentioned above), but there’s no reason that Answerbag couldn’t carve a niche out of the blogosphere or independent Web sites. I am very interested to see how Infosearch Media plans to incorporate this service into their SEM tools.
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