Google Answers Closing Up Shop 145
EricTheGreen writes "It isn't often that Google completely kills a product, which makes the announcement of the end of Google Answers noteworthy. I find it particularly interesting, given that there's clearly a market for this service. Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems ... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?" From the blog post: "Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds. Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our building might be on fire."
In case it goes down again, the text (Score:5, Informative)
11/28/2006 10:22:00 PM
Posted by Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, Software Engineers
Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time -- and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product. Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds.
Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our building might be on fire.
The people who participated in Google Answers -- more than 800 of them over the years -- are a passionate group committed to helping people find the information they need, and we applaud them for sharing their incredible knowledge with everyone who wrote in.
If you have a chance, we encourage you to browse through the questions posted over the last 4+ years. Although we won't be accepting any new questions, the existing Qs and As are available. We'll stop accepting new Answers to questions by the end of the year.
Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.
It didn't work out as planned. (Score:5, Informative)
The price??? (Score:3, Informative)
Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems ... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?"
Umm... the price. Google Answers was a bounty-style format for answers- you ask a question, post a sum you're willing to pay for the answer. Someone finds the answer, you pay them.
Yahoo! answers is totally different. It's bascially a glorified message board with some rating controls - anyone can post a question, and anyone can answer a question. It's totally free.
Because of this, you see two things if you spend some time looking at Google Answers vs. Yahoo! Answers:
I think it's pretty easy to deduce from this what's happened. Google came out with this Answers idea first. BUt like so many projects in the Google incubator, not many people know about it. Combine this with the fact that it is a pay-for service, and you get something that's very underutilized. Normally, Google wouldn't care much about this, since they have oodles of horsepower (look at all the obscure projects going on at Google Labs all the time). But they had to process payments for this thing, that means overhead. And it likely wasn't making any money.
Business 2.0 knew it was coming (Score:2, Informative)
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosuccee
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosuccee
--Tefen
Re:Reasons for closure. (Score:4, Informative)
Google Answers to share ad revenues (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Informative)
For those who aren't good at finding things the following are some good tips:
1. A good vocabulary / thesarus is very handy (which rules out half of
2. Good and bad spelling is important. Just because you can / can't spell a word, doesn't mean that everyone else can / can't.
3. Word order can be important, too (even on engines that say it isn't).
4. While I rarely use operators (AND, OR, -, etc.), knowing them is good for that hard to find query.
5. Quotes around multiple words are more important that the operators. It means that the words have to appear together and in that order.
6. My engine of choice is Google, but targeted engines might get you better results.
Other links to useful tips:
http://www.internettutorials.net/search.html [internettutorials.net]
http://www.monash.com/spidap.html [monash.com]
http://www.extremesearcher.com/handbooklinks.html [extremesearcher.com]
Layne
Re:Reasons for closure. (Score:4, Informative)
http://answers.google.com/answers/researcherguide
As I was one of the first researchers approved, I can say that they were serious when selecting researchers. After the first 400 researchers, they stopped accepting any more applications. The rest are selected among the "commenters" (ie. those non-researchers who commented on answers).
Re:Got Answers and Nowhere to Share Them? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome [mturk.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Tu
Re:It failed... (Score:3, Informative)