Most of the talk surrounding Yahoo these days seems to be focused on debating which company Yahoo is going to be bought by or merged with.  Before that, the big restructuring of the management that included the departures of a couple of the company's leaders was a popular topic of discussion.  And before that, it was the so-called "peanut butter manifesto".

Yahoo could use some good news, don't you think?

Here comes Hitwise (by way of SlipperyBrick) to the rescue with some newly released statistics that show Yahoo! Answers as the clear, dominant force in the Q&A market.  In fact, Yahoo! Answers reportedly owns slightly more than 96% of the question/answer website traffic.  Its nearest competitor, Answerbag, holds on to only 2% of the remaining market share.  That's great news for Yahoo!

In Yahoo's Education-Reference category, Yahoo! Answers came in second only to Wikipedia (which recieved 5 times as many visits as Yahoo! Answers).  Google is no doubt assisting Yahoo! Answers in its dominance both by sending 23% of the sites visitors that way and by terminating its own Google Answers service late last year.  In fact, Yahoo later issued an invitation to join its Answers service to former Google researchers who were part of the defunt Google service.

[View the Hitwise report in a new window]