Score One for Yahoo!

Yahoo!'s approach also gave it a clear advantage when it came to questions for which there was no right answer, such as "What are the best Web sites to find financial aid?" Yahoo! considers its efforts in social search so important that it has started to list Answers along with its normal search results, and plans to knit the two together more closely in the future.

That Yahoo! so quickly gained the upper hand in a business Google has been chipping away at for a long time seems an odd reversal of fortune. We've almost grown used to Yahoo! struggling to catch up with Google, whether in trying to close the gap in money made in the search business, or in closing big deals like Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of video search company YouTube in October.

And that's been reflected in each company's stock. While Google has spent the better part of the past six months climbing toward an awe-inspiring $500, shares of Yahoo! are just a few sessions removed from their 52-week low.

But this Yahoo! triumph in the fast-growing social search space speaks to what Yahoo! does exceptionally well -- and what Google tends to do rather poorly. Talk to any Yahoo! executive, and they're quick to mention that Yahoo! is a "people-powered" company. While there is an obvious element of sloganeering to that, Yahoo! knows how to harness the wisdom of crowds -- a lot of which exists in its enormous user community -- much better than Google.