Do you go berserk whenever you are looking for something you are sure exists on the web but you can’t find it? Don’t worry: it’s happened to all of us at some point, and Q&A forums can be a good and more humane way to solve the gaps of search engines. Like many other similar sites which are seeming to pop up everywhere, Yahoo! Answers depends on a community of members who post questions to be answered by the community of users in a short period of time (usually four days); once you get an answer, you rate the person who provided the information you felt was more accurate or more useful, and thus help determine who are the most authoritative collaborators, and who aren’t.
Some questions are simply not so easy to settle, and in that case you can get the community of readers to help you decide and vote collectively on the best option. After a question has been answered, that is, an answer has been decided on, either by the person who posted the question in the first place, or by the community, they become closed, so that nobody can provide more answers for the same question, but users are allowed to browse those answers to find out about cool stuff. There are lots of reasons why this service is useful, the first one being that people trust it: Yahoo! Answers is the third most visited site in the reference category; it boasts an impressive number of 20 million users, who have given nothing less than 400 million answers in different categories, ranging from health, education, finance or tech to dining out, Yahoo products and relationships. As is the case in any other user-generated content site, as more and more people use it, the site becomes more and more reliable, though this issue has been questioned by several sources, including a recent Slate.com article. 
