Gijs van Dam

While commenting on this Techcrunch article on yet another Quora clone nobody is waiting for, my comment turned out to be something of a blogpost, so why not suit the action to the word.

The problem I have with all those Quora type of services is that they are only useful for trivial bullshit questions I didn't want answered in the first place. Daft questions and even worse answers, you could probably have found within 10 seconds on Google, and you would have found better answers had you invested 30 seconds.

Useful questions, the type of questions people write blog posts or articles about to answer them insightfully, get answered by just using a "classic" search engine that takes you to the post/article.

I like social, but I don't see why a group of people that I accidentally follow would be better equipped to answer my questions, than a bazillion of scientists and experts that have their articles online, searchable by something we all thought was the best thing since sliced bread a few years ago, called Google.

By extension, Google's attempts to make the SERPs more social reduces the relevancy of their results.

So ASCII stupid questions, get stupid ANSI, and as a rule, the Social Web is perfect for that. But personally I like it better when that process takes place in my local pub. For intelligent answers I like to rely on Google classic.