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

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: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.

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.

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.