Yahoo! India Answers blog

Thank you to those who have been testing our new Answers Ratings feature and providing us with valuable feedback – it’s led to some great insights and some good improvements.

We’ve listened to you and have now included Negative ratings, as it was important to you to flag incorrect or misleading answers effectively.

The new Ratings system includes the choices you asked for, it incorporates our learning, and we believe it improves Answers in both finding and asking information. We trust that it will increase your enjoyment of, and the effectiveness of, our well-loved Answers product.

For the next few weeks, different members will be randomly given one of two following variants

1. Agree, Disagree, Amusing, Useful

or

2. Thumbs Up

Clicking Thumbs up will show the following optional selections

- Agree

- Useful

Thumbs Down

Clicking Thumbs Down will show the following optional selections

- Factually Incorrect (answers that you know are wrong. ex: 2+2=5)

- Incomplete (answers that do not give as much detail as you’d like to see)

- Irrelevant (answers that you feel are not in context of the question)

Clicking Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down will register your rating. Additional selections are purely optional, but at last you get the chance to explain why you are giving the rating. This may aid the answerer in future. When you rate an answer with a Disagree or Thumbs Down that answer will only be hidden to you, however it can still be viewed by other members. Your usage of these will be tracked, to help us decide which combination will be the permanent one. So here’s your chance to move Answers one step closer to how you’d like to see it working.

It is important to note that you can only give one rating to each answer. But you may change your rating if you change your mind. This will remove the old rating and replace it with your new choice. Ratings will not be associated with points. So you will not get any points for rating or for being rated. We want the Ratings to be based on pure merit.

Please take the time to rate the answers so that other members will know which answers of theirs the community thought were fantastic.

Thanks for reading,

Yahoo! Answers Team