Of the many websites one can love to hate, I particularly love hating Yahoo Answers.

It’s a Q&A site where people ask questions and receive answers – or something – from the crowd. Most of the questions seem driven by insecurity, desperation or middle-school assignments.

At the moment, my personal favourite reads: “When i first moved into my house 12 years ago there was a small lemon tree that now grew to be a massive one that produces a lot of lemons. How can this symbolize me other than growth.”

Question-and-answer sites have a long heritage, but the quest to perfect the model keeps yielding lemons. Some, like Yahoo, are great big sour ones. Others are small and maybe even sweet, but restricted in scale and not terrifically lucrative. Right now, though, two services are competing to reinvent the model.

One is called Quora, a site that was the subject of unrelenting hype this year. The other, launched two weeks ago, comes from Facebook itself: It’s called Facebook Questions, and as such, is on the fast track to ubiquity, whether or not anyone asked for it.

There are some worthy precedents for the Q&A concept. One long-running site, Ask MetaFilter, takes a time-worn approach, simply throwing questions open to its thousands-strong community of users, regulated only by a $5 joining fee to keep the ruffians out and the diligence of its handful of moderators. It’s a successful and thoughtful site, but its simple model allows it to get only so big. And size raises the spectre of the spammy Yahoo Answers, which seems to exist more to drive page views than to help readers.

Quora suggests one way to make quality and quantity co-exist: Give users a sorting-and-categorizing apparatus so elaborate that it seems to be the product of a bureaucrat’s fevered fantasy.

Open for 10 months now, it’s a hopeful website with the kind of name that smacks of civic ambition while technically meaning nothing. In recent months, it has achieved the critical mass of users to edge it into the mainstream.

Like other Q&A sites, Quora wants to connect questions with expert answers. It takes its mission very, very seriously. It asks users to provide their real names, along with their subjects of expertise and areas of interest. Then, it pipes them a feed of questions that it thinks they would be interested in answering.

Plenty of expertise is on display. Questions range from the practical (Where is a good place to eat after a Canucks game in Vancouver?) to the experiential (“What does it feel like to be schizophrenic?”). On the whole, the answers tend to be erudite and considerate.

But good luck getting into it. To achieve this high-quality matching, Quora is full of fiddly widgets and little moving parts. Every question and answer get tagged and rated. Everywhere you turn, there are rating buttons, friends lists, notifications, feeds and suggestions, and bits and pieces lifted from social networks and wikis. Not only is it overwhelming and abstruse, it’s pointed: Quora seems to distrust users’ ability to sort themselves out organically and tries to order them into line.

No such worries beset Facebook. Its own project, Facebook Questions, is just starting to work its way through the network. Facebook says Questions (as it would have us call it) is designed to help users who compulsively poll around for suggestions: What movie should we watch tonight? Which Ben & Jerry’s flavour is the best? What should we name our daughter?

To facilitate this process, Facebook Questions literally lets users set up polls, so your Facebook friends can click to choose between “Crystal,” “Krystal,” “Kristall,” and “Jamantha.” Once a friend answers your question, their friends also can see it, so the questions spread virally through the network.

The theory is that the polls will serve this kind of utilitarian purpose. In practice, Facebook users have been using it to conduct various forms of a preening popularity contest: Who would you vote for in the next election? Do you support my pet political cause and/or social gripe? Who’s your favourite character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

The model has sharp drawbacks. Keeping questions confined to friends’ lists severely limits the chance of finding information that is not immediately at hand, since you’re asking such a narrow set of people. It’s just as hard to glean much information about social opinion this way, unless you’re prepared to be surprised that the majority of your self-selected friends happen to agree with you.

The futility is almost endearing: Looking for the solution to one Internet scourge – let’s call it the Asinine Question and Answer Site – Facebook has managed to blunder directly into another: the Entirely Bogus Internet Poll.

Facebook Questions will have its uses (I suspect it will work well when confined to matters of taste), and Quora could outgrow its zealous adolescent ungainliness. But the perfect Q&A site – the one that’s big, accessible, useful and reliable – is probably a mirage. If you want human answers to a question, you’re going to need to have humans on your website. They’re a hassle, I grant you, but there’s no engineering them away.

This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail.