Question classification is one of the tasks in question answering system. Since questions often have rare words and colloquial expressions, especially in the application of voice interaction, the traditional text classifications perform poorly in short question classification. Thus a short question classification algorithm was proposed, which was based on semantic extensions and used the search engine to extend knowledge for short questions, the question's category was got by selecting features with the topic model and calculating the word similarity. The experimental results show that the proposed method can get F-measure value of 0.713 in a set of 1365 real problems, which is higher than that of Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm and maximum entropy algorithm. Therefore, the accuracy of the question classification can be improved by above method in question answering system.