Not All Is Gold That Glitters: Response Time & Satisfaction Rates in Yahoo! Answers

This study investigates two questions concerning question-and-answer sites. We analyzed data from "Yahoo! Answers", including 19 months and over 20 million interactions per month. The first question investigates the differences in response time and in the average number of answers between an asker's ranking of "Best Answer" (BA) and the community's BA. The second question concerns the impact of an explicit network on several implicit network activities. The results imply that askers use response time as a parameter to choose the BA, whereas the community chooses the BA with no regard to Answer Response Time (ART). Another finding implies that if the answerer is not listed in the asker's "explicit network, " it might result in longer ranking (award) time and in a slightly decreased number of answer stars (satisfaction-rate indicator). And yet, one result might be surprising. Being a "fan" of the asker implies a long response time to the question. This finding might contradict the intuition that our friends are the first to provide answers to our questions. Several explanations of this result from different research fields are suggested in the discussion.

I. Introduction

Social Q&A services are online information-seeking sites offering a method, a place and a community [21], [32]. These sites are variously known by many names [23],[27],[28],[31] and have common features such as a public or semi-public profile, a list of other connected users and a list of connections [7]. The participants' activity in these sites create ties to other users through asking and answering questions, evaluating and ranking the answers and establish a social network [4], [5], [22], [30],[32],[33],[36].