Score One for Yahoo!

That's because the subtle process of herding and pointing people to things plays well to Yahoo!'s roots as an Internet media company. Yahoo! Answers plans to keep building on its system of giving users who provide correct answers more prominence and visibility, for example.

Google's more systematic approach to the Answers service, meanwhile, resembles the tendencies that have made it so successful in the search business. Users post content -- whether a question or an ad -- and then assign a value based on what it's worth to them.

But not only did this weigh against questions that didn't necessarily have a definitive answer, it also meant that many questions did not pay enough to be worth a Google researcher's time.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, was able to accomplish more through virtual pats on the back.

As the Web evolves to include different mediums and less structured types of data, Yahoo!'s media mastery -- which has often been belittled in comparison to Google's technical dominance -- may once again become an asset rather than a liability.