Yahoo Answers came out today - it's a "place where people ask each other questions on any topic, and get answers by sharing facts, opinions, and personal experiences." Funny, I liked that the first time, when it was called a forum, or a message board, or a blog comment area, or - okay, I'll stop.

Seriously I did really try to get excited about Yahoo Answers because I lurve Yahoo. They were my very first Internets experience. And so I have very fond feelings for them - I even got to tour the Yahoo campus. Here's basically how the Yahoo Answers widget works:

• Ask a question. In order to ask a question, you must have an account with Yahoo. If you already have one (I have several), you can rather quickly breeze past some basic setup stuff and go ahead and ask a question.
• Answer a question. There are already a LOT of questions being asked, and they're all nicely categorized in browsable topics to the far left of the site. Every time you ask a question, you are asked to put it into a category-you're tagging it-in order for it to be found more easily.

What I find most interesting so far about Yahoo Answers is that the questions are just so varied, and it's fascinating to read the answers. This isn't anything overwhelmingly new or innovative, but frankly it is a bit of a refresher to have something that actually works and is pretty useful after the mishmash of recent rollouts from other, more well-known (cough cough Google) search engines.

One more thing that is aimed to make Yahoo Answers just so hip you can't resist it - you earn points the more answers and questions you come up with. There is actually a scoring system in place, and even Yahoo doesn't know what they're going to do with you if you answer a lot of questions:

I'm thinking that since that highest level is the Black Level, a black belt would be in order, so I could go around saying that I have a black belt in Yahoo and yes, that is very lame. Super, super,lame.

Overall, I think that Yahoo Answers is interesting; it takes Digg and message boards and makes them into a virtual Reese's peanut butter cup of answer-y goodness (remember those old commericals? You put my peanut butter into my chocolate..you put my Digg into your message boards...it kind of works).

Related: I've written a lot of articles and how-to's about Yahoo, and here are just a few:

• Yahoo Cheat Sheet-Yahoo Search Shortcuts: Free, printable Yahoo cheat sheet.
• Yahoo Reference Search: Gray's Anatomy, Spanish Dictionary, World Factbook, and more are all included here.
• Yahoo Special Properties: There are many special Yahoo properties that are not part of its searchable subject index and search engine listings. Actually, there are so many that I'm only going to highlight a few of my favorites for you.