Twitter has always been good for getting immediate answers to the most esoteric questions. Usually it is someone who is following you who supplies the answer, and those are always the best ones. But Q&A sites also want in on the supplying answers to people with questions on Twitter.

One of the biggest Q&A sites on the Web, Answers.com, now offers answers to anyone who Tweets a question to @answersdotcom. (The @answers account is owned by Mahalo, which has its own rival social Q&A service on Twitter which routes questions to humans). When you Tweet a question to @answersdotcom, you get a reply almost immediately which is the top answer from the site, or from WikiAnswers, which it also owns.

@Answersdotcom does best with trivia or factual questions. Ask, How many bones are in the human body? It comes up with 206. Or, How many people live in France? It estimates 65 million.

But if you ask, What wine goes with lamb?, apparently nobody has ever asked that on Answers.com.

Ah well, there’s always Aardvark.

Crunchbase

• ANSWERS CORPORATION
• MAHALO

Company: Answers Corporation

Website: answers.com

Launch Date: December 1998

Funding: $45.4M

Answers Corporation (previously GuruNet) owns and operates Answers.com. Answers.com is an advertising-supported Q&A and reference site aiming to be the internet’s “one stop shop” for information. WikiAnswers, previously known as FAQ Farm, was acquired by Answers Corporation in November 2006. It’s similar in concept to Yahoo Answers in that it’s a user-generated Q&A community, but unlike Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers is in the form of a wiki. This allows users to change and hopefully improve old...

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Company: Mahalo

Website: mahalo.com

Launch Date: March 1, 2007

Funding: $21M

Mahalo is a human powered search engine founded by Silicon Alley veteran entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Results are generated non-algorithmically by a team of profile builders who create pages for search terms. Mahalo includes the most appropriate hand found links and information about for about 10,000 unique queries. By 2008 the company hopes to reach 25,000 profiles. Not unsurprisingly, search results are generated at a limited speed, because of the absence of an automated engine. ...

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