Went to session with Bradley Horowitz - VP of Technology Development Group for Yahoo! and heard him talk about the acquisiton of flickr and how to lower barriers to partipation in collaborative environments...all very interesting...but then he started talking about Yahoo! Answers.

As product manager for eSeries/eCM, i am on a daily basis both intrigued and haunted by search. It's the inevitable siren calling - the lure of a better and more precise search experience. I hear it from customers, partners, anyone who does anything on any website....My favorite from back in my consulting days has to be the inevitable comparison to google where I would hear...

1. we want it to have same search returns as google or
2. we want an interface and experience that is easy to use like google.

I'll be honest, it always shocks me that people do not understand how difficult and costly it is to create an experience that looks so easy. But also how much easier it is to do overall when you are focused on one task. As a side note, google appears to understand that with teh variety of offerings they are undertaking their search for user experience professionals has increased.

But back to Yahoo! and Bradley....He started talking about this product that I have never heard of before that they released back in December called Yahoo Answers - anyone ever hear of it? If not you need to take a look. It's a way to let you "search for knowledge that doesn't exist"..

You have a question and search doesn't turn up relevant results. You can go ask your question and have people answer it for you. Then once a question has been open for a period of time it can go under review, where participants can review the question/answer pair and decide upon the best answer. That answer then becomes categorized and searchable...

Now, you may find when you check out answers that there is a lot of silly questions and what not going on - which is true and part of yahoo's culture - to let the noise through, but think of the possibilites.....(they just released the API a couple of days ago)....

New type of content for CM

Community based/tech support search and retrieval...

what other ways could we use it?