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Jyve is another search engine trying to use online collaboration to answer your questions.

It is like Cha-Cha, which does something similar, letting real people answer your questions. But Jyve says it is better because it can link you with experts in the topic area you are asking about. It gives you a way to IM/chat with the people answering your question, and if it merits in-depth research, the person providing the answer can ask for a fee. The fee is negotiated. The site itself will remain free for you to use.

Other services are emerging to facilitate searching for answers to tough questions. Yahoo Answers, the leader, is giving you a way to track people who provide good answers, in part to combat spam. There’s also the Techcrunch-profiled Uclue, started recently by some ex-Google employees, which also charges for giving answers.

Like these services, Jyve doesn’t focus on providing answers quickly. It takes its time to do the proper research.

VentureBeat tested it with several questions, including “How to install Xubuntu on an old IBM Thinkpad 380XD?” Jyve put us in touch with someone who gave us a link about how to do this after two minutes.

For simple questions, this site is inferior to other options, such as Google. We tried: “Where can I find information about Faith No More?” (this is a 1990’s rock band). Jyve took over a minute to get an answer back.

One reason for delay is that your question gets forwarded to groups of regular people already logged into the site. They are interacting with each other, apparently often having fun hanging out. When they see a question arrive in the system that applies to their particular specialty, the members discuss who is best fit to answer. The most knowledgeable person initiates a chat session with you to help find an answer.

Sometimes, you get more then just your answer. In one test, we asked: “Where can you find business plan templates?” The person continued to interact with us for minutes after they answered the question. They have an incentive to be friendly. In addition to negotiated fees, there’s a “tip jar.”

Jyve started as a company in 2004 based out of San Francisco. The company has an angel investment of $600,000 which they received back in June of 2006. The search site officially launched February 20th.

The latest roundup of the action happening in Silicon Valley:

First evidence of YouTube wealth — What do you do with your money, when you get it? One way is to spend $20 million to buy Andre Agassi’s Tiburon estate. That’s what Stuart Peterson, of Artis Capital Management, an investor in YouTube, did, as PE Week’s Alex Haislip reports. Or you can invest it into night clubs, as some Web entrepreneurs have done.

Google Answers shuts down, while Yahoo Answers booms — This is one more confirmation that Google does best with automation. It started its answering service before Yahoo did, yet was blown away by Yahoo. Google is not adept at the messy business of getting humans involved. Yahoo claims 60 million unique users of Yahoo Answers. It just signed a deal with Answers.com, too. This is a rare victory for Yahoo, and should encourage it to stay focused on its relative advantage at implementing “community”-oriented projects.

Allow comments anywhere on your site — There are some places on blogs or web sites where comments aren’t enabled by the site’s software. So Lev Walkin, a Cisco Security Engineer out of Santa Clara, has come up with a way to let you place them pretty much anywhere, called JS-Kit (via Techcrunch).

Will U.S. Supreme Court brake global warming action? — The future of many clean-tech start-ups here in Silicon Valley depends in part on Washington. The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether California can move ahead with strict pollution controls. In European, meanwhile, the opposite is happening. Brussels is forcing stricter controls on member states, rather than braking.

Danger raises $10.3 million from Sharp –This deal makes sense, because Sharp is building a Danger “hiptop” device, similar to the one distributed by T-Mobile, to run Danger’s software. Also, in case you missed it, see the update on our recent snarky post about Danger and its IPO. Hank Nothhaft took exception, and we clarified some facts. He says the company’s valuation has increased, which is a good sign.

Fuddy U.S. companies on London’s AIM — Now the Brits are suddenly asking why the U.S. companies going public on the London alternative stock market AIM are doing so poorly. Two thirds of them are losing money for investors. Could the reason be that the only reason U.S. companies listing on AIM is because 1) they couldn’t do it in the U.S., or 2) they couldn’t raise money from private equity investors (or venture capitalists) at a time when it is very easy to raise money?

Presto launches the photo service for elderly or tech-phobic — We wrote about Silicon Valley company Presto’s product a while back. Presto has $10M from venture firm Kleiner Perkins and others.