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.

Re:Reasons for closure.

[funfail]

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

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).