• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 7, 2011

What's behind a question? On Answers.com, more than 10.9 million answers from the user community that today answers questions on more than 6,700 categories -- topics ranging from relationships to medical issues.

Answers.com on average gets an automotive question every 1.5 seconds, and a science question every 27 seconds. The company provides reference library licenses of 250 encyclopedias and dictionaries for free. Two weeks ago, the company added the Random House Word Menu containing related words -- not only synonyms, but concepts.

Bob Rosenschein, Answers.com founder and CEO, views the site as an information service that provides quick answers to just about anything. "We're the Wikipedia of questions and answers," he says.

Both the user interface and the backend system will get an overhaul this year. An automatic reputation management system pronounced RE-MUS that measures statistical factors took nine months to build. The content comes from the member community, so the tool is built to identify a correlation exists between capitalization, spelling mistakes and the quality of the answer.

A new user interface dubbed "Project Aqua" will roll out in the coming months. A mobile application will also become available for a variety of cellular phones later this year. There's also a plan to connect the entire social graph. The plan is to add social features that not only allow the user to follow friends, but tie into their social graph.

Answers.com will tie into the Facebook platform and Twitter. Members will have an option to follow questions and contributors, and make it easier to make recommendations and ask friends. Rosenschein, an MIT graduate in computer science, says people will see the company work with Microsoft, Google, Twitter and others.

"The company's profitable -- we have $25 million in the bank, we're the eighteenth-largest audience and growing, and we're just having fun," Rosenschein says. "You'll see us work with Twitter and Google."

A lot of the growth has been search-driven, Rosenschein says. The "virtuous cycle" generated from the "more questions, the more answers; the more answers, the more traffic; the more traffic, the more questions." The site boasts 5.8 million registered members. Since 2006, it has generated 10.9 million answers from the user community and plans to hit 11 million this week.

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps to drive traffic. Elements on the page are positioned for search engines like Google and Bing to easily find, index and categorize. The pages built mostly in JavaScript heed to the requirements of spiders, and sometimes content gets written in "ACML when appropriate, so pages get finer tuned for search engines," he says.