Nic’s blog
I write about building businesses, failing and building a life, not a legacy.
Answerit vs Google vs Wikipedia & trustworthy sources
Strange. I honestly did not believe that Answerit would manage to take on the mighty Google with a question that I posed.Yet I stand corrected. Answer it might not have provided me with the perfect answer at all but I was able to narrow the answers significantly. While on Google I was wading through ten tons of word related answers to a question taken out of context. One. word. at. a. time.So this was my test question: What is the largest website in the world?It's broad so the answers could vary, specific enough to warrant a genuine answer, and relevant to the people who might be interested in the topic. So I did help the service out a bit. It was a fairly easy question to garner some answers.People took to it like wildfire (relatively of course). In 3 hours I received 9 answers. That's good odds I think. Of those nine there were some relevant answers, some ill-researched ones and a question or two posed back to me. Very community orientated.When I asked Google the same question, the answers were fairly dismal. Nothing that was relevant or helpful.This is only one question, one example and very, very early in the life of Answerit. It is not a search engine, don't misunderstand me, but let's be honest, we all use Google as an question/answer service.I have some reservations that can only be proven in time. One of these is the Wikipedia phenomenon. This is basically a temporary version of what Wikipedia is or has become. You can pose a question, on a topic and have a host of people (in the future) rally to find you the right answer. Wikipedia is permanent and it appears to me that questions posed on Answerit are available for a week. So it's much more of a quick fix answer service. Nice.But how can we actually trust these answers? Are sources sighted? Are the people answering community members or hired by 24.com? Are they average joes who sit in their dark basements taking pleasure out of giving me incorrect information? You laugh, but those people exist and they are screwing with your mind right now.So basically, I like the service, I think it needs a bigger community and I think it might need to explain a bit better why we should trust the answers it provides.