HitWise is reporting 118% year-over-year growth for question and answer sites like the category leader Yahoo Answers. The report lacks any sort of referral statistics — like where the traffic is originating — but I have the theory that it’s coming from people continuing to ask search engines questions rather than Q&A sites.
Returning traffic appears quite low. Yahoo has the most impressive results with about 50% of it’s traffic from returning users (does this mean returning Yahoo! members, or just Y! Answer users?) but other sites in the report are heavily lop-sided averaging only ~15% of users returning.
What does this mean? Users are coming to get answers and not to ask questions.
So as search companies try to develop ways to determine users intent from natural language search, current algorithms have understandably funneled users with natural language queries to sites that have natural language Q&A.
I’m not insisting it is bad that users don’t turn first to the Q&A sites to have their questions answered. We have all come to use search engines as our portal to the Web. But these Q&A sites have marginal value in their current form because once natural language search because a reality, these sites, with inferior content and lacking devotion from the user-base will move from page one results. Not a great outlook for the long-term but the growth does indicate the quality of participation is improving and that they are creating value for the Web. Kudos.
