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."
It failed... (Score:4, Funny)
Got a question?
Chances are if Soviet Russian gay nigger overlords aren't the answer, fish posters and licensing trolls are.
And God bless every one of them.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Doesn't trolling generally seek to elicit a negative response, or somehow misrepresent facts and lie to incense the audience?
I referenced a few common slashdot trolls and running jokes in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Christ.
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Remember kids, nothing is sacred in America anymore except artificially imposed ethnic offensiveness.
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Casually typing "nigger" would have caused me to mod you down if I had mod points.
If any of the people on Slashdot are Black (like me) then putting that word out there definitely elicits a negative response.
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Cliche='In soviet russia'.
2) You said "gay", not "fag".
Referencing the 'gay niggers from outerspace' troll.
3) Instead of saying "Black", you said "nigger".
Being that the name of the movie is Gay niggers from outerspace, I think that's rather understandable. How could anyone not recognise all of these on sight? I read slashdot about once a week, and 'I' got them.
Re:It failed... (Score:5, Insightful)
overuse and humor are probably the best way to drain the words of power.
continuing to act like they have power gives them power they don't deserve.
More to the point--- he was parroting text in common troll spam jokes here at Slashdot.
When I was a young naive programmer... I worked in a language with six letter variables.
I had a count field that i wanted to abbreviate. Two letters were reserved for the area (orders, invoices, etc.).
So I dropped the O and and orcunt, incunt, xxcunt. The senior programmer came by and just about had a cow and yet- couldn't explain what the problem was. He finally just said trust him and change it to cont so I did. there was no internet back then so it was a little difficult to find out what the problem was.
I get the impression that the parent poster really just sees nigger as any other mildly derogatory term (and to be fair- a ton of blacks use it daily without any problem- it's a like a special reserved word they can use playfully, insultingly, innocuously but is magically derogatory if anyone else uses).
As more whites and blacks, and mexicans and blacks, and asians and blacks date, marry, and interbreed, the term becomes hard to define anyway.
And personally, I prefer humor about anything (death, aids, my having cancer, me losing my hair, me being a geek) over getting all huffy and serious about it. Only through humor are we going to destroy the true racism by showing just how stupid it is to think you can know about a person because of their skin color.
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Re:It failed... (Score:4)
Depends a whole lot on why you're saying it.
If it's "I personally don't want to sign up, because my type is those who happen to have about my own melanin levels", that doesn't seem particularly racist.
If it's "I'd prefer people not do that, because I think races should be distinct and unmixed", that's a whole lot more problematic.
(It's a good thing we're not offtopic here or anything.)
Re:It failed... (Score:4, Insightful)
You are free to think what you like, and everyone else is free to think you are an asshole.
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If members of one group have genes X=AA and members of the other race have genes X=DD, then the results are children with AA, AD, DA, and DD. Effectively creating 2 new groups who may not be affected by the proposed calamity.
So your argument is a good one for heavy interbreeding.
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little joke there.
Okay so seriously,
For your argument to hold together, you need an isolated population and random trait "E" which for some reason becomes either
* becomes common in the population for an unrelated reason (people with popular noses who get laid easily also happen to resist the latest deadly flu because their noses are drier inside.)
* is immediately valuable right now (such as rampant Aids in Africa right now is almost certainly
You mean Chinegro (Score:2)
There was a movie where a woman actually defined the different kinds of intrebred races. Can't remember it for the life of me.
Aha! Domino (2005)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421054/quotes [imdb.com]
Some of her other ones were Blactino, blackasian, hispasian, koreagro, Japegro, Chispanic, koreaspanic, and japanic.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
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We're taking back porch monkey [youtube.com] too.
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However, you were raised to think of yourself that way so I
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Glad the funny guys finally got you over the hill.
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Except with slashdot you have to read all (or at least most) of the posts, and using all that data make a detrmination for yourself as to the correct answer.
Or maybe that is not such a bad thing. I usually use that method when trying to learn something new. Get as many opinions as possible from every possible angle, then put them all together and come up with the most likely answer.
Google Slashdotted??!?! (Score:2)
"The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds."
woot.
Re:Google Slashdotted??!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, actually, they're owned by Google, they're pwned by Slashdot. --wix
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Got Answers and Nowhere to Share Them? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Got Answers and Nowhere to Share Them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Got Answers and Nowhere to Share Them? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, the barrier to entry for Google Answers was way too high. You had to pay to ask, and you had to go through a small job interview to answer. Once I found that out, I never touched it again. It wasn't free, so it never developed a community around it. Google should have seen that coming a mile away.
It seems like the way to go would be a two-tiered system. People would be able to ask and answer questions, and eventually if they generate a high enough "trust metric" they would be allowed to answer for-pay questions. People could ask questions for free, or chip in a few bucks to motivate answers. People with insufficient credibility would be allowed to answer as well, but they'd get the "anonymous coward" treatment (e.g. answers not visible by default). Once the question is closed, the person has to select the best answer(s), and the money is divvied up.
Yahoo should learn from World of Warcraft: You can get people addicted to leveling up.
Of course, once you get money involved, people will start looking for ways to game the system.
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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
Blogspot Slashdotted? (Score:1)
OSTG announces: Slashdot answers (Score:4, Funny)
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The horror.
While Taps plays in the background.
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A: "SCO did it."
A: "In Soviet Russia, gallon of gas is in T-Rex!"
A: "More importantly, how many gallons are in a Beowulf cluster of Tyrannosauruses?"
A: "It's 'How many T-Rexes are in a gallon of gas'. The Grammar Police strikes again."
A: "A European T-Rex on an African one?"
A: "I bet Roland de Piquepaille sent you to ask this. Go away."
Yeah, that'll go real smooth.
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.
Reasons for closure. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Reasons for closure. (Score:4, Informative)
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Unless you do not reveal the criteria this statement is quite worthless - to put it differently: hand-picked nonsense.
CC.
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).
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CC.
Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I always tried to use the Google search engine to find information first, almost always succeeded. The few times I didn't, and yet wanted to know badly enough to use Google Answers (and I offered a good price) my questions expired unanswered.
It seems it would only be able to help when you actually don't need it. From its description it seemed like they would just research by trying Google queries and getting the information. If you know how to get relevant queries (use of Google's minus operator helps get rid of junk) you often can do it yourself and if you can't it is likely little good info is available on the public and indexed part of the web.
Still, it was a nice idea and a shame it couldn't be made to work. Too many expired questions (the 30 day lifetime was too short I believe) was a big part of it.
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:Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
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I fully expect NOT IN to use an index, for example.
I haven't really looked into the performance of OR vs. UNION. I rarely use OR, preferring to use IN instead on those few things that I actually need an OR for. I haven't studied the performance of IN vs. writing, say, 4 queries to check IPv4 masks, but I'm just going to assume IN will be faster.
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Of course, I normally change my code to read:
select from Table where exists( select 'TRUE' from Sub-Table where )
Instead of
select
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A small addition for anyone who, like me until recently, doesn't know: you can put an asterisk in quotes to wildcard words. For example: "red * car" will search for 'red', zero or more words, then 'car'. It comes in handy quite often in searching for technical things.
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I've googled a lot, never found anything but guesses and unverified claims (about how long the US army uses to train translators, for instance). Never found any actua
But Why? (Score:2)
Maybe I should ask google answers...
Why? Perhaps lack of awareness. (Score:4, Interesting)
new about it because I saw it mentioned somewhere and decided to check it out.
If you went to google.com, it wasn't even listed there. There's a good chance that
90% of the world wasn't even aware of it.
And honestly, even if *everyone* knew about it, there's only a small fraction that
are either too busy or too lazy to look it up themselves.
It didn't work out as planned. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It didn't work out as planned. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Google Answers was a project that didn't have the results that were being sought. I'm sure the people who ran the project are still seeking those results, just not through this project.
Because Google Answers weren't free (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo Answers [yahoo.com] are completed by random people who have enough time to sit around and answer what appears to me to be a lot of really stupid questions that people should have been able to figure the answers to by themselves.
Apparently people prefer a free answer of questionable accuracy to having to pay for an answer.
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Well you answered it yourself. The questions are dumb enough that they know that they don't want to actually pay someone to do it. They want people to find the answers for them for free. If you have to a) use effort or b) use money, you might as well do it yourself.
Re:Because Google Answers weren't free (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like Wikipedia to me.
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It's hard to compete with "free" (Score:3, Interesting)
Silicon Valley is littered with dead companies who have tried to complete with "free". I enjoyed many amusing sales pitches about "value proposition" from start up companies selling overpriced software while free software was available to do nearly the same task. In some cases "free" is worth what you paid for it. In other cases, the free stuff ourshines the for-sale software. Most of the time, it's somewhere in the middle.
In any case, if there is a competitor offering a free version of the same produ
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In 95% of cases, a bit of googling will bring you something of the same quality. I guess the Yahoo Answer is the not the exact reason whey Google Answer folds... This case is more like cannibalism between projects...
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That I can understand (no, really!). What I can't understand is why you'd use a Q&A site to do it. If the answer is that easily available, it's probably right there on a google search or Wikipedia. Plus not only the answer to your question, but in the context of an article. If it isn't... well, then with 99%+ accuracy you'll get no answer or an uninformed answer. To me those fill two quite different markets, a
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Re:Because Google Answers weren't free (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Because Google Answers weren't free (Score:5, Interesting)
Then they mark your answer as completely unhelpful, and you lose your ranking as someone who provides good answers.
That happened to me ONCE and I said fuck it.
was good for backlinks... (Score:2)
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.
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- Should I send a wedding invitation to people I know can't come?
- Does Mrs. Claus have a first name?
- What's the deal with kids wearing their pants below their butts?
Yep, I'd say "lame" is a good description.
I can't actually click through to see what's there beyond the questions, because the corporate WebSense filter tells me it's a chat or message board.
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But it lets you on Slashdot?
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This, people, is... (Score:1)
Business 2.0 knew it was coming (Score:2, Informative)
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosucceed
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosucceed
--Tefen
Answer to "Why is Google Answers Closing?" (Score:3, Funny)
Google Answers to share ad revenues (Score:3, Informative)
Ex researchers are building a replacement service (Score:5, Interesting)
We researchers can see the potential for a new service. Even though the existing service might not suit Google's current needs, it has been popular with researchers, customers and commenters.
I'm researcher eiffel-ga at Google Answers, and I've enjoyed my four years there even though I only answered 199 questions. All of the researchers are really sad to see the service folding.
It was great.... (Score:2)
It would have been interesting to have a 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 200$ selection as opposed to the freeform input--give people a way to choose from a set range of options instead of giving them the task of identifying a price. It may sound trivial, but for people not familiar with the answers system it might have helped some folks get o
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Should have done like Yahoo (Score:1)
Who's yer daddy? (Score:5, Funny)
Turns out it's usually the one who married yer mommy. But not always.
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Question (Score:5, Funny)
Google has more to lose here than one might think (Score:5, Interesting)
Has anyone thought about the other side of this, though? Google is becoming the de-facto data warehouse for the masses, and its success is partly due to peoples' perception (right or wrong) that it will just "always be there." This discontinuation of a service could put a huge dent in that confidence, even if they never make the data unavailable.
I barely used Google Answers, but did every now and then. I use the hell out of my GMail though, and it's really come to replace my Zip disks & USB sticks as my medium of choice for portable storage. That's happened in part because of that same nebulous feeling of permanence -- that fuzzy belief that Google is big enough that I don't need to worry about them discontinuing anything.
To me, even though it doesn't affect me much in a direct way, this decision still inflicts the first real injury to my perception of the Google brand. I used to be willing to invest some time kicking the tires of just about any Google offering, since they could afford to keep services out there even when they weren't big winners, just because they were cool. It's a small shift in thinking for me, but I wonder if it might not have a surprisingly large effect on my Google usage habits in the future.
Just a thought.
Re:Google has more to lose here than one might thi (Score:2)
I was actually just trying to remember if I'd heard of another Google service that went away, and how tragic it would be if they did. However, I figured that was the first sign that they were turning into any more mature (read: less cool) company. All of the other major web service companies have opened and closed, or completely reincarnated a bunch of services. I guess it's a sign of weakness I hadn't seen from Google yet.
OTOH, I guess if you had to pick a Google service that I wouldn't shed tears over,
I'd like to see GA integrated into Google Groups (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'd like to see GA integrated into Google Group (Score:1)
Re:I'd like to see GA integrated into Google Group (Score:1)
While your idea may hold some weight -- it would be much easier to reach the target audience with the kind of diverse segregation that Usenet offers -- it would be too
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I get most of my answers by... (Score:1)
Bad News for Google Stock (Score:1)
Obvious competition (Score:1)
http://www.pbnation.com/showthread.php?t=1872475 [pbnation.com]
http://www.genmay.net/showthread.php?s=a69fba41b66 d1eff21a2f920476dbe65&t=691767 [genmay.net]
http://chachachats.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]
http://www.rotteneggs.com/r3/show/se/700-forum-dis play_topic-0-1-1298121.html [rotteneggs.com]
Just to name a few places where it's not only mentioned, but enjoyed and abused far more than google answers
It must be said (Score:3, Funny)
Niche information is NOT cheap, Google messed up (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand, when I have a question which I don't know the answer, can't easily find the answer, and don't have the time to dig for the answer -- Google connects me to someone who does/can.
Most importantly, Google Answers was a way for me to buy expensive specialized niche information for cheap.
For
Did it fail, or did Google just lost interest? (Score:1)
So it wasn't that people weren't trying to use the service - people were asking lots of questions but Google didn't keep up the number of researchers th
Question answering requires HUMAN INPUT (Score:2)
And handling human input is not Google's core strength. They are excellent at searching through texts, finding patterns, etc. But offering answers from humans (beyond simply "googling it") is something else — not that they can't do it, just that it is not employing their major strength...
So their offering was not better than Yahoo!'s (probably even worse), and hence they wisely killed it...
I suspect, their image-tagging project will suffer a similar fate. That it still exists is, probably, due to
Had to happen sometime (Score:2)
Make it commission based ? (Score:2)
I mean if they have $$$ coming in, why just cut the service? Maybe too much dudes sitting there on a fixed salary and doing nothing ?
hmm...
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WebQuotes went bye bye too (Score:2)
Replaced by ChaCha (Score:2)
Campaign to save Google Answers (Score:2)
I believe that it is less "evil" to keep Google Answers than to end it so suddenly, at Christmastime, when many people depend on it for a living. Many Researchers are disabled or senior citizens, and every researcher does their own bit to help the world through their research. There is no reason for Google to give up on it rather than improving it.
Help keep Google Answers by signing this petition!
http://www.petition [petitiononline.com]
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