Reviewer's Guide
In a Nutshell
What if every word or phrase on your screen was linked to a ready definition, explanation, history, or more? It's the way the Internet was envisioned from its inception; just click on any word to retrieve more information about it, instantly.
Answers.com, the world's greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia offers a unique website/software combination to provide instant, reliable and accurate explanations on over 4 million topics from more than 180 trusted reference titles.
Answers.com is the ideal tool for the millions of people who need quick information across multiple disciplines as part of their daily routine: writers, editors, students, marketers, journalists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, IT professionals, medical personnel and nutritional consultants, among others.
Benefits
Answers,com is not, strictly speaking, a search engine. It’s a content-rich site with powerful search technology behind it. Search engines have many unique benefits: They are terrific at indexing the web and giving you the tools to explore it; they are the place to go for complex queries with multiple topics (e.g. hardware stores in Honolulu) or to see how a topic evolved over the years (a collection of articles on the genome). In these cases, a search engine acts like a switchboard — it delivers a list of external links to the sites where these keywords are mentioned, leaving you to sort through them. But what if you want a specific piece of information, a definition, a translation or a quick fact? With Answers.com, you can skip the traditional search process in favor of a more elegant alternative: a clear answer collected from multiple sources, unified and displayed on one page.
Using Answers.com is like having a free reference library and research assistant at your fingertips — all with a click of your mouse. You can also learn more about Answers.com via the quick, entertaining flash demo on our homepage.
The Website
Answers.com is a destination website for people who want reliable facts without the hassle of searching for them. Direct access to all of Answers.com's content is available through the look-up box at the top of the homepage and each results page, with no need to log in, download, subscribe or pay. Here are a few of the features that the website has to offer:
- Let us do your guesswork. Using our "Find As You Type" technology, users save even more time by clarifying and focusing queries as they are entered into the search box. With each letter typed, Answers.com checks its index for matching topics and returns these suggestions in a drop-down list.
- AnswerTips™ -enabled. Double-click any word on the entire site for an AnswerTip bubble with a quick explanation of the word. This feature is also available for bloggers and webmasters to install on their own sites (see below).
- Browse the library shelves. To experience the breadth of Answers.com's four million topics, take a look at the list on the left-hand side of each AnswerPage, where you'll find a taxonomy of our content categories. You'll also find the latest additions to our library on the What's New page.
- Keeping you up-to-date. Today's Highlights is a showcase of fascinating facts, chosen daily by our content editors. View it on the homepage or as part of 1-Click Answers. Alternatively, sign up for an email or subscribe to our RSS feed to receive Today's Highlights daily.
- Mobile Answers – get Answers on the go! Full access to Answers.com content is also available via most PDAs. Mobile Answers supports Treo, BlackBerry and WinCE-based hand-helds. Just bookmark http://mobile.answers.com/ on your wireless handheld for quick-loading, text-based answers on demand. Screenshots of this feature are available on the press page.
The Free Download
To provide answers quickly and conveniently, Answers.com has several options for accessing information without going to the website first. All of these ad-ons are free, and you can find more information and updates about them on our Tools page.
1-Click Answers™ 2.3 for Windows (latest version released 5/28/2007) includes three time-saving mechanisms to help you get instant Answers:
- Alt+Click — point to any word or phrase on your screen, hold the Alt key and click for a pop-up bubble with a concise AnswerTip. This new feature won't interrupt your work, and if the concise Answer isn't enough, the full collection of sources on that topic is just a click away via the "More" button.
- AnswerBar — a retractable button docked conveniently at the side of your screen; it's only seen when needed. Click on the arrow button and the AnswerBar pops out with a lookup box.
- IE Toolbar — a helpful browser add-on, giving you another way to access Answers.com when you already have a browser window open.
1-Click Answers™ for Mac:
- 1-Click — Use the Command+Option+G key combination to trigger a lookup bringing you directly to all of the resources Answers.com has on that topic.
- MAC Widget for Mac OS X — This gives you quick access to the content of Answers.com directly on your dashboard.
IE7 Toolbar Search Box — Users can add the Answers.com search to their IE7 browser and look up information from Answers.com directly from the search box.
Firefox — you can search Answers.com directly from your Firefox browser. Just download Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and check out Answers.com in the Firefox Search Bar in the upper right-hand corner.
Why does Answers.com provide several different methods to get to the same answer? Answers.com realizes that different people — techies, newbies, casual users, office workers, web addicts, researchers, writers, readers, kids and everyone in between — have diverse work styles and prefer to choose the most effective way of getting to fast facts in a variety of situations. Each is quick, efficient and fun to use.
Company Background
Answers.com was launched in January 2005 by the GuruNet Corporation, now Answers Corporation. Founded in Jerusalem in 1999 by Bob Rosenschein, Answers Corporation (NASD:ANSW) succeeds with a single goal: delivering clear, accurate, instant information to Internet users, consolidated all on one page.
Answers Corporation's presence and success in the world of online research is evident from the hundreds of thousands of user downloads and glowing reviews in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA Today, Business Week and many others.
After a number of years of selling a subscription service for their growing library of facts, the company responded to the evolving need for organized, online information and launched Answers.com: a next-generation, super-efficient "reference engine." Advances in the realm of targeted advertising allowed us to move away from a subscription model in order to offer the same outstanding reference resources, relying on an ad-based revenue model.
Today, Answers.com is proud to provide reference solutions to partners, including, among others, The New York Times, CBS News Online, Firefox, Opera and The New York Public Libraries. Recent Awards received by Answers.com include Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) esteemed Codie award for Best Education Reference or Search Service (May 18, 2006) and the award of "Top Information Service" in Information Today's 2006 People's Choice Awards (October 23, 2006). Additionally, Microsoft has selected Answers.com as a recommended site for their IE7 toolbar searchbox. For investment information, visit ir.answers.com.
The company's corporate office is located in New York and its R&D branch is in Jerusalem, Israel.
The AnswerPage
After typing in a query, users go directly to the page that best fits the query. Here are some of the features they will find when the get there:
- Multiple Content Sources. Answers.com aggregates facts from over 180 titles of some of the most respected publishers in the reference industry. Houghton Mifflin, Barron's, Britannica, Columbia Press, Roget's, eSpindle Learning, Thomson Gale, Investopedia, TechWeb, CIA Factbook, All Media Guide, Who2, Hoover's and Wikipedia are just some of the names you'll find on our site. We also have more dynamic information coming from sources such as CBS Marketwatch/Inlumen and Accuweather, as well as video and news for popular news, entertainment, sports and health topics. Most recently, we’ve acquired and begun to incorporate WikiAnswers, a dynamic, community contributed Q&A feature to truly deliver Answers to all types of questions.
- The 'did you mean' feature helps "disambiguate" or clarify the term that was entered in the search box, whether the original lookup was too vague, spelled incorrectly, or had multiple meanings. For instance, when you're looking for the Da Vinci Code, you'll get there fast, whether you meant the book, artist, movie, lunar crater or computer chip.
- The citation feature at the bottom of every AnswerPage encourages users to cite their work. After finding information, users click the associated "Cite" button at the bottom of the page to instantly create bibliographical entries using MLA, APA or Chicago styles.
- Editorial elements are added by our own content team to supplement the 180 reference sources with these original extras:
- Holiday Guides: Everything you wanted to know about the year's holidays, including their origins, customs, special foods, who celebrates them and why (e.g., Valentine's Day, Passover, Ramadan).
- Resource Centers: topical entries that provide a stimulating overview to a subject (with relevant internal links) as well as links to additional external resources (e.g., Bird Flu, Taxes, Paris).
- Fast Facts: Trivia tidbits, presented as bullet items (e.g., Ty Cobb, Reed Willis).
- AnswerNotes: Topics added by the Content team to update existing content (e.g., phish, Hakka)
Communities
- Answers.com in Education — two mini sites, Teacher's Toolkit and Librarian Lowdown, are equipped with information focusing on the many ways that Answers.com can be helpful to educators. The Answers.com Education Team has prepared a variety of resources for educators to use. We've put together a classroom movie and lesson plan, Mission Possible: Successful Online Research, which is a self-contained lesson that addresses many of the issues facing students who use the Internet as a study tool. Our free posters and student guides covering Internet citations, word etymology, research organization and the writing process are available from the toolkit as well. Finally, educators can also sign up for a free newsletter with covering current issues in education, seasonal topics and lesson plan suggestions.
- Bloggers and Webmasters — this page serves as portals displaying the fresh ways that Answers.com can be incorporated into blogs and websites. In addition to embedding AnswerLinks and AnswerBoxes, AnswerTips can also be added to blogs and websites, by inserting a bit of html code. Find out more about AnswerTips here.
- Small Business Center — a landing page which focuses on terms and topics related to small business owners. You'll always find the latest explanations on everything from technology to taxation, franchising to financing. Plus the small business toolbox helps you track down everything from business plans to company profiles.
By the Numbers:
A synopsis of Answers.com's statistics as of March 1, 2007:
- Answers.com is the #53rd most popular US property (comScore Media Metrix, June 07).
- Over 2 million users visit the site on an average weekday (comScore Media Metrix).
- According to Hitwise, Answers.com is the 103rd most popular site in the US, and the 4th most popular site among 4,403 sites in education and reference.
Technical Requirements:
- Our software has been tested for compatibility with all supported release versions of IE, Firefox and Opera browsers (IE 6 & 7, Firefox 1.5 & 2, Opera 8 & 9).
- Windows 2000 / XP or Mac OS X (10.2 and higher).
- Download size: the installer is a 1.3 MB download that takes up about 3 MB when fully installed (about 2 minutes by 56Kpbs modem, under 20 seconds by broadband).
- An Internet connection (broadband preferable, but not required) .
Firefox has Answers.com pre-installed in the Search Bar (in the upper right-hand corner). Install our cross-platform Firefox extension to gain the benefit of Alt-Click functionality on all web pages.
Our downloadable software is not yet available for Linux, although we invite Linux users to use the web-based interface or the Firefox extension.
Technical Support can be reached at support@answers.com. Though we generally supply a quick, next-day response, you may identify yourself as a member of the press for priority handling.
Answers Corporation Press Contact:
Jay Bailey, Director of Marketing
j@answers.com
888-248-9613
For screenshots, logos and additional information, please visit http://www.answers.com/main/about_press_kit.jsp.
Reviews you can use:
- College Journalist Sample Article (not copyrighted; feel free to borrow text)
- Sample Newsletter Articles (not copyrighted; feel free to borrow text)