Not all is Gold that Glitters Response time & satisfaction rates in Yahoo! Answers Amit Rechavi Sagy Center for Internet Research Graduate School of Management, Univ. of Haifa Haifa, Israel Amit.rechavi@gmail.com Sheizaf Rafaeli Sagy Center for Internet Research Graduate School of Management, Univ. of Haifa Haifa, Israel Sheizaf@rafaeli.net Abstract - 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. Keywords-component; Yahoo! Answers; Response time; Satisfaction rates; Wisdom of the crowds I. INTRODUCTION A. Social Networks and Q&A sites 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]. In contrast to traditional Q&A systems or services in library settings, social Q&A sites provide a venue where people voluntarily ask and answer questions and it is the asker who has the responsibility to filter the answers that best fit the information needs and to evaluate and rank the answers. Sometimes the community participates in this process as well. Little [1, 24], if any, was written on the differences in the process of selecting, evaluating and ranking satisfying answers by the asker or the community. This study will explore these differences using Yahoo! Answers data. The study will also explore the response time of asker and answerer in light of two assumptions: (1) The asker prefers to receive information sooner rather than later [16] and (2) Because of such terms as “reciprocity” [28], “obligation” [24], and as a means of “care and presence” [19], the asker’s friends will reply as quickly as possible to her questions. The study investigates Yahoo! Answers data in light of this logic and suggests alternative explanations of the askers and answerers’ behavior. B. Yahoo! Answers’ Site Knowing the answer’s experience and network, having the ability to obtain personalized answers, and receiving a variety of answers are some of the reasons for searching socially rather than through a search engine [4, 9, 26]. Launched on July 5, 2005, Yahoo! Answers enables participants to ask and answer personalized questions on any topic and serves many needs - requesting everyday advice, answering questions, and receiving support [1]. Providing more than 20 million answers per month, about 40% of the Yahoo! Answers questions are opinion-type questions [6, 11, 20]. This might be one of the reasons why its content is deemed to be subjective; its information was found to be noisy, ungrammatical, vague, and poorly stated [25]. And yet, though its expertise depth was barely at the high school level [1], Yahoo! Answers was found to provide good answers to “Complicated Answer” and "Opinions" [24] especially in categories in which a clear and conclusive answer was needed. [35]. The process of asking and answering questions in Yahoo! Answers is rather simple; an asker puts a question to Yahoo! Answers by selecting a category and entering the question subject. If the asker is satisfied with any of the answers, she This study was supported by Yahoo Research, Yahoo Israel, and the Sagy Center for Internet Research. 2011 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust, and IEEE International Conference on Social Computing 978-0-7695-4578-3/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE DOI 904