WikiAnswers vs. Yahoo Answers vs. LinkedIn Answer

By default, I always have gravitated towards Yahoo Answers only because it seems to be the most popular and almost ready with answers to nearly everything. Some days, I admit, my questions are a bit nutty. But we all ask those, “How to make your hair grow longer quicker?” questions even if you choose not to disclose. However, with this assignment I was able to put Yahoo Answers to the real test. I decided that since I am currently on a LinkedIn high, I posed the following question to Yahoo Answers, “What are the benefits of LinkedIn?” Hit Enter and badda-bing, the answers appeared.

Immediately, Yahoo Answers not only defined and broke down how LinkedIn worked in lament terms but quickly, members of the Yahoo Answer community named a number of LinkedIn benefits in a number format. And what I really liked most about Yahoo Answers is that it is interactive as users are able to comment, correct or even rebuttal any of the answers that previous users may have given to an answer. In addition, users even give their experiences. With regards to my question, users went on to give an insight into their experiences with LinkedIn and of course, that led to a number of conflicts between users who decided to debate out the ups and downs of LinkedIn in the bargain.

I then turned my attention to WikiAnswers and posed the same question. For starters, it was a bad day on the WikiAnswers server I believe because it took over 3 minutes for my answer to finally come up. What I discovered that WikiAnswers was a lot similar to Yahoo Answers except that a lot of the time, only one answer came up. I’m not sure if I really liked the limited response that WikiAnswers provided me with. It almost seemed like there was one definite answer for a question. Unlike Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers is not as interactive and detailed. A lot of the answers are short and limited in detail.

With regards to how both of these sites fair in front of LinkedIn Answers, well needless to say, they were not as good. Obviously, LinkedIn Answers is geared more towards answering queries that are LinkedIn related and so, they can give you a greater insight into all questions that are geared towards answering LinkedIn. If I had to choose a “favorite”, I would pick Yahoo Answers simply because I understand it better and like the variety that it offers. However, it terms of professional answers, then it’s definitely LinkedIn answers with WikiAnswers taking spot 3.