Answers aquires online review site ResellerRatings

Rating site helps Answers provide information for consumers to make purchases

Two old school websites, which have each been around since 1998 - the early commercial years of the Internet - are teaming up.

Answers is purchasing customer review website ResellerRatings, it was announced Wednesday. Financial details were not disclosed.

"Adding ResellerRatings to the Answers family is part of our strategy to solidify our leadership in the fast-growing Q&A space and to help consumers find answers to whatever they are searching for online," David Karandish, CEO of Answers, said in the release. "Consumers know they can trust us for the answers to nearly all of their questions, and with ResellerRatings we can now help them make informed purchase decisions on thousands of online retailers."

Walnut Creek, California-based ResellerRatings, founded in 1998, is a site for consumers to rate products and retailers. It currently features around one million reviews of around 40,000 online stores, including Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, Newegg and TigerDirect.

These stores “actively engage in customer conversations by generating post-purchase reviews from customers, and by responding to reviews to provide top-notch customer service,” according to the release.

ResellerRatings attracts nearly two million monthly unique visitors.

"Joining forces with Answers will have a tremendous impact on our ability to deliver hassle-free shopping experiences to consumers, and to help quality merchants stand out from the crowd," Scott Wainner, Founder & CEO of ResellerRatings, said in the release.

A little Answers history

Founded in 1998 as GuruNet, and originally located in Jerusalem, the now St. Louis-based Answers, which calls itself “the world's top destination for trusted Q&A content,” operates Answers.com, WikiAnswers, ReferenceAnswers, VideoAnswers, and five international language Q&A communities in Spanish, French, Italian, German and Tagalog.

WikiAnswers allows users to pose questions to the community, and anyone can answer, edit, or chip in information, while ReferenceAnswers is a forum where questions are answered specifically by editors.  Video Answers maintains a library of some 200,000 videos in more than 200 categories, allowing users to browse through demonstrations and get answers to how-to questions.

Answers, which was purchased by AFCV Holdings in February 2011 for $127 million in cash, was recently listed as the 26th largest property in the United States, with 38,955 unique visitors in June.

Its platform currently contains more than 17 billion answers, with a user base of 160 million. The site estimates that it gets 10,000 new registered users every hour.

Answer and ResellerRatings were not available to comment about the deal.

(Image source: all-things-andy-gavin.com)