Yahoo has announced a fairly substantial overhaul of how Yahoo Answers looks and works — and as a semi-regular user of the site, I’d say these changes are very welcome.

The primary functional changes involve a new set of navigation tabs and a new way of browsing the categories on Yahoo Answers.

The four new tabs will appear across the site, and hovering over the Browse Categories tab will show a dropdown layer that replaces the old laundry list of categories from the left margin of Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo has also changed the general look and feel of the site, and made backend upgrades, as well.

Hitwise has previously said that Yahoo Answers is the number two reference site online, behind Wikipedia. According to Yahoo’s own stats, Answers has:

• 200 million visitors worldwide
• more than one billion questions and answers
• about 15 million users visiting the site each day
• about 350,000 new visitors per day

About a year ago, Hitwise showed that Answers was one of Yahoo’s top 10 properties.

by Matt McGee