My exact thoughts. There has been more than one occasion that I have found good resources on about.com. However, I don't think I can say the same for answers.com. Half the time I run across a page on it, there is no answer just the question. I got so tired of it I blocked it from all my Google search results. It's also filled with so many ads you can hardly find any information on it.
Still baffled by how answers.com expects to get $270M of financing to buy about.com. To anyone who has ever clicked a link to either of those domains from a Google query, the headline must seem Onion-like.
I hope these awful SEO-bait sites keep consolidating so they can eventually fade away into history. I've never gotten a useful answer from either site, just bombarded with ads and filler text. Quora and Wikipedia should be more than enough to fill that entire space (assuming Quora can keep up the quality as it gets more and more mainstream).
I know Yahoo Answers has a lot of spam but there's some gems in there that Quora doesn't have. Especially casual questions and questions related to sex.
This is a huge deal. Historically, about.com was an excellent reference, but with the advent of wikipedia and, in my opinion, the general decline in quality of about.com authorship, it was easy to ignore them.
Hopefully Answers.com can revitalize their unique editorial model, but I'm not really holding my breath.
It's not about Wikipedia. It's about the declining ROI on online publishing, and the effect of Google Panda on their bottom line. Historically, noone visited about.com for reference on a topic.. they just stumbled upon it when they saw it ranking #1 for a keyword.
About.com is the "for dummies" books of search results. Mediocre information on a wide vaiety of topics. It's kind of like a unisex salon in a one-horse town. You don't want to go, but it's there, so many do by default.
Quora, please, please send Answers / About to a spot in the late 90's graveyard next to Pets.com.
