The World Wide Web has become a vital supplier of information for organizations in order to carry on such tasks as business intelligence, security monitoring, and risk assessments. By utilizing the task-technology fit (TTF) theory, we investigate the issue of when open-domain question-answering (QA) technology would potentially be superior to general-purpose Web search engines. Specifically, we argue theoretically and back up our arguments with a user study that the presence of fusion (information synthesis) is crucial to warrant the use of QA. At the same time, many information seeking tasks do not require fusion and, thus, are adequately served by traditional keyword search portals (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.). This explains why prior attempts to demonstrate the value of QA empirically were unsuccessful. We also discuss methodological challenges to any empirical investigation of QA and p...