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Google Answers Closing Up Shop

Posted by Zonk on from the now-how-will-we-know-things dept.

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."

1 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well.. by SQLGuru · · Score: 5, Informative

    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