!http://www.zoinger.com/img/answers.gif 87w 16h! In the “Wall Street Journal”:http://www.wsj.com on Thursday on the 27^th^, Walter Mossberg reviewed “Answers.com”:http://www.answers.com. His final sentence was, “I urge you to try it.” The gist of the story was the Answers is a search company that strives to actually answer your questions as opposed to just giving you links related to query. I’ve tried it out, and it’s not bad for certain forms of querys. However, it is not nearly as extensive as searching the web.

“Snap”:http://www.snap.com is back in business again (or still if it never left) as an “Idealab”:http://www.idealab.com/companies/ company. Idealab is the group that backed GoTo.com which became Overture which in turn was acquired by Yahoo!. So, sometimes they get it right… especially considering that Google ended up “licensing”:http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3392421 the rights to paid search to Yahoo! (who had obviously also acquired Overture’s patent portfolio).

But… whatever. A bunch of new search companies. You’d expect it now that search companies can’t get out of the way of money being thrown at “them”:http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/earnings.cfm. The interesting thing is that Google sometimes links to Answer.com in the “definitions” field (located at the upper right hand corner of a search result page). Try “searching”:http://www.google.com/search?q=earnings&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 on “earnings,” then clicking on the underlined “earnings” in the definition field. Goes to Answers (at least it did for me). So regardless of whether or not Answers is actually paying Google, Google is helping to build Answers’s brand… just like Yahoo! did when Google first started out. Interesting.