TechCrunch and Search Engine Journal recently reported that Yahoo might be selling its "Answers" platform as a part of an effort to get rid of their non-core assets in sight of the possibly upcoming AOL merger agreement. However, Yahoo representatives soon contacted the site webmasters to point out that there are currently no such plans, to the relief of thousands of users around the world.

Yahoo Answers started in 2005 as a community-driven platform where users could ask questions on any topic and then award the best answer that is being given to them. While not always accurate, the information contained there is still an authoritative channel that benefits from high search engine rankings for a wide variety of topics, and has arguably become one of the most distinctive features of the Yahoo company, even if it is not strictly related to the search engine business.

Users can freely post questions and answers to those which have already been posted, and a credit system makes sure that each question gets on average a few responses: user earn points every time they log in, answer a question or have their answer selected as the best one, and a fixed amount of points is subtracted to the user account every time a question is being asked. Since users need to have a positive balance in order to ask their questions, they are encouraged to participate and have their say on their topics of expertise.

The project took some ideas from Google's own "Google Answers" product putting it under a new light and allowing users to actively participate in it. Google's version, on the other hand, was quite different in that users had to pay for trusted experts' answers, which often quoted Google search results. The pay scale ranged from $2 to $200, although the project was terminated on December 1, 2006 after over 4 years of operations, possibly because many users weren't ready to go beyond the 2 dollar
mark to get comprehensive answers.

Although Yahoo Answers has, by contrast, contributed to deliver social media to its users, some analysts maintain that the site is not as well monetized as it should be, which in turn brought to rumors and media speculation that the company might actually be looking to sell this asset: the Financial Times as well as other mainstream media contributed to this rumor, which was however clearly denied by Yahoo representatives.

Likely buyers for the platform have been speculated to be the somewhat similar Amazon Answers or even Answers.com, but it would have been unlikely to see Yahoo selling the underlying user community as well, both because of evident privacy issues and because the company adopts Open ID — a technology which allows users to login to different sites using the same ID — throughout all of its subdomains, which means sensitive data would have been to be shared with the buyer.

What made the rumor plausible in the first place is the possibility that, after a long and troublesome negotiation with Microsoft which didn't end in the desired way for the Redmond-based company, Yahoo might be considering a merger with Time Warner's AOL and consequently seeking to raise capital in order to make the acquisition possible.

Founded in 1983 as Quantum Computer Services, AOL is a 8,000+ employees Internet service company that Yahoo has considered purchasing in the past, at least since 2005, when the company started a slow decline that brought the total value of the company stocks from $226 to just $20 billion: the possibility of turning AOL into a joint venture had however seemingly vanished the moment Google purchased a 5% share of the company for $1 billion. To some, this acquisition attempt from has mainly to be regarded as an answer to Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo earlier this year.

The recent statement from Yahoo spokesmen may therefore be interpreted as either a plan to revitalize and keep investing on the Answers platform in the future, also seen the Yahoo-Google advertising agreement that is being scrutinized in these days, or just a confirmation of the fact that Yahoo has actually no intention to acquire AOL.