“Yahoo! Answers is a place where people ask each other questions on any topic, and get answers by sharing facts, opinions, and personal experiences.”

At least, that’s what Yahoo says about its brand new service, now in beta.

Jeremy Zawodny at the Yahoo blog adds that Yahoo! wants to “give anyone a place to tap the collective wisdom of the Internet for advice, recommendations, theories, jokes, … whatever. Anyone can answer. It’s free.”

Moreover, all answers will be kept in the Yahoo! Answer database and made searchable. Hence, not only does Yahoo! generate a lot of answers that might be useful for its visitors, the company also get a lot of content, for free.

There are already questions and answers available. For instance: “IslandGirl” asks how she can become a movie extra. “phil” has written a four paragraph text giving her some useful advice in that area, including links to resources.

The first question that comes to mind is of course how to control the quality of the content of these responses. The answer is that you cannot. The readers must themselves decide whether to trust the information given or not (which is of course always the case in everyday life).

The major problems will be in the area of health and legal affairs. Wrong answers here may be very expensive economically and can be detremental to the quality of life of those involved.

Hopefully, additional comments will correct some of the most obvious errors and prejudices. Users can vote on the “best” reply, which may help some.

The second question is how Yahoo! plans to stop spammers from filling the database with junk. We would guess that they already have filters in place. It would make no sense for them though to stop informative comments from people trying to draw some attention to their own sites, provided that the info given is of a certain quality.

For the time being there are no ads. That will probably change in the future.

Note that Google has had its own answer service for some time now. The main difference is that Google makes use of “500 carefully screened researchers” to answer questions, and these researchers require a fee for their response.

Gary Price has written an interesting comment on the new service at Search Engine Watch blog.