Microsoft will enter Q&A online market

According to the brand new Microsoft Live QnA blog, Microsoft will soon launch–you guessed it–QNA beta. If you’re interested in signing up, head over to ideas.live.com and then click on QNA, then click on sign me up. Someone they had shared the project’s scope and access to the project posted images and information about the service, and so Microsoft turned on the blog service, and put did an announcement about the service. Dirty rats!! =)

 

From the site:

OOPS!  We hadn’t planned to talk about this yet but some Web pages went live overnight and well, we decided we might as well turn on the blog and give you the straight scoop. You’ll be seeing more on this blog about our team and our product as the days go by. In the meantime here are some more details about what we are doing.

 

And so now we will have a Google Answers, with paid experts, a free Yahoo! Answers, and now a Microsoft QnA. The first two forgot to mention that questions were a part of the equation as well! =) At any rate, according to the QnA blog, this answers engine has been floating around campus for a while, no word on if it was before Google answers or what ever.

From their blog:

A little background…
Once upon a time, there was an intern at Microsoft who had an idea for getting people answers to the questions they needed. He nicknamed it the “hyperengine” and everyone in Web Search used it for internal projects; it was way cool. Then, when he went back to college, the internal discussions started. Shouldn’t we be building a real one?

Grassroots momentum continued and eventually Windows Live QnA was born. We hired the intern back (yes,he graduated) and got another college hire to be core developers of this new idea  — creating a question-answer engine driven by the people.

While, it almost sounds like they are denying they are building a 100 percent carbon copy of all of Google’s offerings while holding a strait face and not even busting up laughing. Very talented indeed!

That dog above looks 100 percent like my dog… If you don’t beleive me, check out my photo album.

 

From the site:

Topics will range from business, health, arts, sports, technology and more.
• Does ivy kill trees?
•  What’s a good, inexpensive moving company in Seattle?
• Any great ideas on getting motivated to exercise?
• What’s the best chocolate chip cookie recipe?
• Can I hook up an Xbox to a PC monitor instead of a TV?

I’ll do a better review once I get my beta account set up.