How is relevance determined?

No one really knows for sure, all we have are theories about how relevance sort is determined.

Yahoo has a software program that decides which answers are supposedly the most relevant and shows them at the top of the list no matter how relevant they actually are.

It is a badly flawed system as it will decide an answer is most relevant when in fact it is not.

No one knows except the programmers exactly how it works.

Using key words from the question or copying the question in your answer will work sometimes.

Long answers sometimes will be most relevant and a minute later a short less relevant one or even a spam answer will be seen at the top as most relevant.

To have an answer show first as most relevant 'All someone has to do is type like this > >>Using Capital Letters And No Punctuation And That Answer Will Show First No Matter If Posted Hours After Others, Relevant Or Not,'<<< clearly showing how badly flawed the relevance sort is when a software program decides.

There is one user who has their questions be first 99% of the time and not for being most relevant at all, just as in your example copies parts of better answers from others hours later.

Removing the time stamp as to when answers were posted just added to the mess.

There are those few users that do choose best answers but often will choose the first one as best which gives any type of answering that keeps an answer at the top as most relevant an unfair advantage.

Just another bad decision by Yahoo.

Yahoo! Answers (formerly known as Yahoo! Q & A) is a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) site or a knowledge market launched by Yahoo! on June 28, 2005 that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users.

Simple,type a long meaningless answer like the one above to get your question to the top of the list.She is an expert at it.