Yahoo! launches 'social search' in Britain with multimillion-pound ad campaign

Yahoo! will launch a service today that allows users to ask other people's advice, when looking for anything from a good hotel or bar to an apple pie recipe, rather than rely solely upon electronically generated search results. The search and online portal operator will promote Yahoo! Answers with its largest advertising campaign in Britain since the dotcom boom.

Yahoo! Answers is the latest example of social search, a new trend in online applications that allows people to collaborate and share information online - as epitomised by sites such as Wikipedia, Digg and YouTube.

Launched in the US at the start of the year and available in test form in Britain since April, Yahoo! Answers is available in 18 countries and has already amassed about 50 million users, who have provided 75 million answers.

Today Yahoo! will launch a nationwide multimillion-pound print, radio and poster campaign to try to attract British internet users to the service. A different celebrity will pose Yahoo! Answers users a question each week for the next eight weeks.

"This is the biggest campaign that Yahoo! have mounted for five or six years," said Stephen Taylor, head of search and search marketing at Yahoo! Europe. "It's a measure of the confidence we have in Yahoo! Answers."

It is also another attempt to widen the scope of the information available on the internet. The first wave of online searching, now dominated by Google, relies heavily upon complex mathematical algorithms to match search terms with information contained in web pages. While useful when hunting out companies, people, products or services, a more nuanced request such as "where is the best restaurant for romance in west London?" requires more than an answer derived from maths.

Yahoo! Answers allows people to pose a question that anyone registered to the site can answer, rather like the Guardian's Notes & Queries section.

Yesterday, questions on Yahoo! Answers ranged from "how do I get black ink from a Biro out of coloured clothes?" and "what documents do you need to enter China?" to "does anyone else think Heathcliff is Earnshaw's son by a black mistress?" and the inevitable "any ladies want to show me their boobs?"

"We see Yahoo! Answers as a way of tapping into the knowledge that is in people's heads," Mr Taylor said.

Questioners impressed with an answer can rate that person as an expert in a particular field. If other people also obtain good answers from this individual, it creates a league table of the best "answerers" in categories such as food and drink, or beauty and style. Some Yahoo! Answers users in the US have already gained a reputation as providers of trustworthy responses, rather like PowerSellers on the eBay auction site.

The whole enterprise, however, relies upon creating a large pool of people who regularly check back to pose and answer questions. Yahoo! is hoping that over time it will be able to amass answers to questions that its search engine has struggled to provide.

The endgame could be to include data from Yahoo! Answers in search results generated by the company's main search engine. While Mr Taylor would not comment on whether this was the ultimate development of the service, he said: "We do see our core internet search and social search getting closer and closer together. Essentially, what you are building is a global knowledge database."

Google has already widened the information available to its search engine through its Google Books project.

While scanning books in university libraries has annoyed some in the industry, who see it as a violation of copyright, information held in out-of-copyright texts is increasingly accessible through its core search engine.

Backstory

Social search is not new. Sites that relied on users rather than machines to map the internet appeared in the mid-1990s. But the advent of broadband has seen an explosion in sites that rely on "folksonomy".

Unlike taxonomy, this relies on users generating their own labelling system. An example is the bookmarking site del.icio.us, which is now part of Yahoo!.

Allowing users to flag up interesting content to a wider community is also central to the news site Digg and the hobbies portal Fanpop, while local information portals such as Yelp and iBegin in North America also rely on users.