Back in May I announced the Y!Q Challenge by saying:

What if there was a concrete incentive to play with some of the stuff we've been building? Like maybe a cold, hard $5,000. That'd buy you a nice new

Powerbook. Or a dozen

iPods. Or a year's worth of unlimited music for 100 of your closest friends. That's what the Y!Q Challenge is all about. Your job is to impress us with your use of Y!Q on your web site. Our job is to be impressed and fork over the cash.

Our panel of expert judges has reviewed all the submissions and asked me to reveal them here. They based their judging on four main criteria:

• Relevance: How effectively have you set context so that Y!Q produces results with maximum relevance?
• Prominence: How prominent is the placement of Y!Q on your site?
• Placement: How creative and intuitive are the placements of Y!Q icons on your site?
• Usefulness: To what degree does Y!Q enhance the overall user experience on your site?

Here's what they said...

Third Place

Site: Particletree.com

Implementation by

Particletree did a tremendous job with prominence, topping all entrants with heavy visual customization that integrated the look and feel of their Y!Q implementation with the rest of their site. Y!Q links were also included on most of the articles on the site, and in many places within each article, something undoubtedly made simpler by their implementation of "Lazy Linking," an integration of Y!Q with the TextPattern content management system that they use.

Second Place

Site: Owensperformance.com

Implementation by

Owensperformance did a great job with prominence, with Y!Q links being available for all article headlines on the home page, as well as the detailed articles. Relevance was also a strength, with context being set fairly effectively in most cases. The combination of effective prominence, relevance and the nature of the content on the site contributed to strong overall usefulness.

First Place

Site: Geekextreme.com

Implementation by

Geekextreme did a solid job with relevance, perhaps aided by their development of a Y!Q Mambo that integrates Y!Q with the Mambo content management system. The integration provided a simple way to set context for Y!Q and it appears they have taken full advantage of it to their benefit, and to the benefit of visitors to their site. Prominence was aided by a nice visual customization for the overlay. The frequency of fresh content on the site, combined with the solid relevance resulted in great overall usefulness.

Congrats to the winners and thanks to everyone who entered the challenge. We saw some very interesting and creative uses of Y!Q and look forward to many more. By the way - we added a few in-line Y!Q's to this article to illustrate some other Y!Q usage examples. Hope you find them useful.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search