In this work, a new evolutionary model is proposed for ranking answers to non-factoid (how-to) questions in community question-answering platforms. The approach combines evolutionary computation techniques and clustering methods to effectively rate best answers from web-based user-generated contents, so as to generate new rankings of answers. Discovered clusters contain semantically related triplets representing question-answers pairs in terms of subject-verb-object, which is hypothesized to improve the ranking of candidate answers. Experiments were conducted using our evolutionary model and concept clustering operating on large-scale data extracted from Yahoo! Answers. Results show the promise of the approach to effectively discovering semantically similar questions and improving the ranking as compared to state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.