Google Answers Closing Up Shop

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."

Comments

In case it goes down again, the text

[Mateo_LeFou]

Adieu to Google Answers

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.

[gmezero]

Google Answers was originally designed to build a giant knowledge base of data to complement Google searches. Unfortunately, over the years it turned into lots of specialised questions with little re-use value, as most simple answers were found simply by Googling them. Therefore it never achived it's goal. I'm not surprised at this turn of events.

The price???

[brunes69]

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:

• Google Answers has more interesting and difficult questions that need some research, whereas Yahoo! Answers has some really lame questions. This is because you don't have to pay a bounty on Yahoo!
• Google Answers has far less questions being asked, again likely because you have to pay for your answers
• The Google Answers interface is not as polished.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Business 2.0 is running a story "How to Succeed in 2007" that features short responses from Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. In both the responses they seem to say Google will be cutting back on its features.

http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosucceed /index.html
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosucceed /12.html

--Tefen

Re:Reasons for closure.

[funfail]

800 is the number of researchers, not the customers. They are hand picked through a very selective process.

Google Answers to share ad revenues

[D H NG]

Although the last day to ask questions is today, us researchers have a month to answer the unanswered questions. Additionally, Google notified the researchers that it will share the ad revenues generated from the questions that we answered. The details haven't been worked out yet, but it should be a nice severance package for some researchers who urgently need it (some researcher's sole income is from Google Answers, such as the extremely popular pinkfreud-ga. What a horrible surprise when we're told that it would end with very short prior notice (2 days ago).

Re:Well..

[SQLGuru]

Yeah, I second the "good searching skills" vote. My rule of thumb is that if I'm trying to find something and it takes longer than 2 hours, it isn't really available on the Internet. Most things take less than 15 minutes, obscure things less than 45.

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 /. already).
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
http://www.monash.com/spidap.html
http://www.extremesearcher.com/handbooklinks.html

Layne

Re:Reasons for closure.

[funfail]

The general guidelines are documented at

http://answers.google.com/answers/researcherguidel ines.html#aboutgar

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?

[g8oz]

Don't forget about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service which is *sort* of the same thing.

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Tur k

Re:It failed...

[jZnat]

Casually typing "nigger" would have caused me to mod you down if I had mod points.

A subtle reference to GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America), not to black people... You must be new here (especially new since they've been trolling a lot lately).