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.

Blog Post With Over 900 Comments

Holy baloney, 900 comment is insane. I think one time a while back I got about 50 comments and I was so happy I almost shat myself.The Dilbert blog (if you don't read it, you should) posted yesterday asking its users to answer a question about restaurant marketing and event hosting.On reading the post I was astonished at how flattering the author was (however sarcastically) to his readers call them "The Great Blog Brain". In return for his flattery he got 900+ answers to his posed questions. Don't ask me what they all said, there were 900 of them remember.This does make me ask a some questions and question some answers about blogging and the approach some, if not most bloggers take with their blogs. Does it not make more sense to ask rather than dictate? Don't get me wrong bloggers with authority and a genuine knack for writing then by all means go all Fidel up in your blog. If you have no skills, no talent, no authority and nothing else going for you, then maybe you should be asking a few more questions of your readers.Is that not what social media is meant to be? Google has all the answers apparently, but that is not true. It can't tell you what love is meant to feel like, it can't tell you how sore a broken arm is, but I bet you that a few readers could give you brilliant answers to both of those questions.I think an experiment might be in order. I think that I might try this tactic and see what comes of it. Let's ask some questions.