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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."
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.
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.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!