Consult the oracle?

I admit to being absolutely passionate about information retrieval and knowledge-based systems. I had not heard of the term 'social searching' previously though. I had not deliberately tried either Yahoo!7Answers or WikiAnswers before, although some Google searches I had done (I think where I had used a question in the search field instead of a Boolean search phrase) had led me to Yahoo!7Answers. I was not that impressed, I suppose because of the lack of authority of the answers, however for a quick answer to a more general knowledge question I could see that it might be useful to some. I tried a couple of questions today and much preferred WikiAnswers. I liked the way that, you ask a question and it gives you a selection of questions that are similar that have been asked before. In this way, there is some control over quizzing the database and extracting the answers and the computer system can measure the results more accurately. The Yahoo! tool seemed more conversational, more social and less structured, although I only tried both a few times. Both tools looked incredibly similar (colours, layout, etc). I think I will have to test these a bit longer to see if I think they are okay tools or great tools!