Yep, the old maxim "garbage in, garbage out". Yahoo! was the biggest internet company out there (maybe AOL was bigger). You had the whole population in all its

Yep, the old maxim "garbage in, garbage out". Yahoo! was the biggest internet company out there (maybe AOL was bigger). You had the whole population in all its warty glory using Yahoo as the default search engine, landing page, email, and who knows what else. Plus answers was done at a time when we were extremely naive about the wisdom of crowds and open source knowledge. Later efforts learned from those early 2000s failures. I'm pretty sure Joel Spolsky specifically called out Yahoo Answers when he was talking about what Stack Overflow was going to do right in his early announcements.