Who was responsible for building Yahoo! Answers?

Ofer Shaked and I were the first people to start the Answers Team at Yahoo!. The original team listed by Wally built it, but the original code was based on Yahoo! Taiwan.

The idea of free Q&A with gaming elements was introduced by Naver in Korea, way back in 2002.  Yahoo! Korea was the first to mimic this but was not successful. Then Yahoo! Taiwan did it and was super-successful, so the idea to port it into US became a project.  It was originally called Knowledge Search, and Eckart Walther was responsible for naming it "Answers".  Everyone wanted it to be called QnA, but he was insistent.  And in the end, it was the right call.

Quora and Aardvark are basically derivatives of Answers.  If we were a startup, and not part of Yahoo! we would've kicked their butts.

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Yumio Saneyoshi on Quora:

• Were Mahalo, Aardvark and Yahoo! Answers better quality services in their earlier days?
• Quora is a curated community of early adopters now; it's nice, but how can it scale? What will prevent Quora from becoming more similar to Yahoo! Answers?
• Has Yahoo! Answers made any changes in response to Quora?

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