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

Got Answers and Nowhere to Share Them?

[vivekg]

Yahoo says they believe in the power of community; in people helping people get answers to their questions. This is an open invitation to all Google Answers Researchers: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000385.html

Re:Got Answers and Nowhere to Share Them?

[D H NG]

As a soon-to-be former Google Answers Researcher, I say no thanks. The questions there are bordering on idiocy and the answers are sometimes even less informed. If they're willing to pay for it, I'd be willing to put up with that, but working for free to a bunch of juveniles? Give me a break.

Well..

[TheGreatHegemon]

It's honestly no surprise - Google has a lot of money to invest in different projects, but that doesn't mean they're going to waste it on something that doesn't work. Besides, people probably just use the Google Search Engine to find their answers anyway.

Re:Well..

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

True in my case.

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..

[SQLGuru]

I do admit it is funny and somewhat ironic, but I chalk it up to my SQL background as to why I DON'T use the operators when searching. I tend to use multiple windows/tabs to search, so if I'm going to do an OR, I'll just run the query in two windows. When you throw an OR into a SQL query, you can kill performance of that query. A lot fo the time a UNION of two result sets is faster than the same query with an OR (sometimes not, Query tuning is a form of technical voodoo). Of the operators, the one I use most frequently is -, but again, only when normal methods fail. A NOT operator doesn't use an index well.

As a side note, I prefer multiple windows vs multiple tabs. With tabbed browsing, all pages are running in the same memory space. If one result has a bad page (by bad, I mean slow / resource intensive), it bogs them all down. I have my browser set to run each different instance in a different memory space. New window means that the others still perform ok. And if I need to kill the offender, it doesn't take all of my windows with it.

Layne

Reasons for closure.

[Kadin2048]

I think that makes the reason why it's going away pretty clear:

The people who participated in Google Answers -- more than 800 of them over the years

Wow...all 800?

Why? Perhaps lack of awareness.

[MarkGriz]

Sure most slashdotters knew of Google Answers. But even then, I myself only
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's hard to compete with "free"

[vinn01]

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 product that you are selling - you had better have a hell of a sales force and marketing team.

Ex researchers are building a replacement service

[ribuck]

A bunch of soon-to-be-ex-researchers is preparing a replacement service, although it might take a few weeks to get it running. Announcements will be made at http://web-owls.com/, a team blog run by GA Researchers.

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.

Re:Because Google Answers weren't free

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Not only that, Yahoo is full of trolls. For example, they'll ask a question like "How do we know the age of fossils?" You'll answer and they'll respond "WRONG. The Earth is 6000 years old."

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.

Re:The price???

[LMacG]

According to my customized Google home page, three of the current questions posted on Y! Answers are:

- 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.

Google has more to lose here than one might think

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

So far I've heard reasons for the closure referencing things like there being a mere 800 researchers, the service didn't really take off, it wasn't shaping up as a real long term success prospect, etc...

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.

I'd like to see GA integrated into Google Groups

[Chris Chiasson]

One of the problems with Google answers is that the researchers were not experts in the some of the domains in which the questions were asked. It would be better if they could graft the bounty functionality into Google groups itself, IMO.

Re:It didn't work out as planned.

[rolfwind]

It sounds like Wikipedia has fulfilled that niche better and perhaps they are giving up because of that?