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Online question‐answering (Q&A) services are becoming increasingly popular among information seekers. While online Q&A services encompass both virtual reference service (VRS) and social Q&A (SQA), SQA services, such as Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers, have experienced more success in reaching out to the masses and leveraging subsequent participation. However, the large volume of content on some of the more popular SQA sites renders participants unable to answer some posted questions adequately or even at all. To reduce this latter category of questions that do not receive an answer, the current paper explores reasons for why fact‐based questions fail on a specific Q&A service. For this exploration and analyses, thousands of failed questions were collected from Yahoo! Answers extracting only those that were fact‐based, information‐seeking questions, while opinion/advice‐seeking questions …