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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."
because of the obviously superior and free competing product Slashdot offers.
Got a question?
Chances are if Soviet Russian gay nigger overlords aren't the answer, fish posters and licensing trolls are.
And God bless every one of them.
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
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
The horror.
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.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
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.
Yahoo Answers are completed by random people who have enough time to sit around and answer what appears to me to be a lot of really stupid questions that people should have been able to figure the answers to by themselves.
Apparently people prefer a free answer of questionable accuracy to having to pay for an answer.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yahoo!'s offering continues to flourish, it seems ... so what made Yahoo's service more attractive than Google's?"
Umm... the price. Google Answers was a bounty-style format for answers- you ask a question, post a sum you're willing to pay for the answer. Someone finds the answer, you pay them.
Yahoo! answers is totally different. It's bascially a glorified message board with some rating controls - anyone can post a question, and anyone can answer a question. It's totally free.
Because of this, you see two things if you spend some time looking at Google Answers vs. Yahoo! Answers:
I think it's pretty easy to deduce from this what's happened. Google came out with this Answers idea first. BUt like so many projects in the Google incubator, not many people know about it. Combine this with the fact that it is a pay-for service, and you get something that's very underutilized. Normally, Google wouldn't care much about this, since they have oodles of horsepower (look at all the obscure projects going on at Google Labs all the time). But they had to process payments for this thing, that means overhead. And it likely wasn't making any money.
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.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Business 2.0 is running a story "How to Succeed in 2007" that features short responses from Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. In both the responses they seem to say Google will be cutting back on its features.
d /index.htmld /12.html
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosuccee
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosuccee
--Tefen
--
make install -not war
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.
Although the last day to ask questions is today, us researchers have a month to answer the unanswered questions. Additionally, Google notified the researchers that it will share the ad revenues generated from the questions that we answered. The details haven't been worked out yet, but it should be a nice severance package for some researchers who urgently need it (some researcher's sole income is from Google Answers, such as the extremely popular pinkfreud-ga. What a horrible surprise when we're told that it would end with very short prior notice (2 days ago).
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.
Paid Q&A/Research
No, actually, they're owned by Google, they're pwned by Slashdot. --wix
When Google Answers first opened up, I thought I'd find out the answer to the age-old question, who's yer daddy?
Turns out it's usually the one who married yer mommy. But not always.
Has anyone asked if they can keep it open ?
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.
Pi Ran Out
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.
I was going to get a Google answer as to why Google answers was closing their doors, but alas.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Then again, it could've been an actual typo this time.
Google Answers was great. Although I was never qualified as a researcher, I am an expert in my field, and would love to spend my free time answering people's questions for a moderate additional income.
On the other hand, when I have a question which I don't know the answer, can't easily find the answer, and don't have the time to dig for the answer -- Google connects me to someone who does/can.
Most importantly, Google Answers was a way for me to buy expensive specialized niche information for cheap.
For example, I could purchase a Q4 2006 ODM report to tell me which ODM Dell is currently using to manufacture the XPS M2010. I could purchase additional reports to tell me how much was designed by the ODM, and how much (if any) by Dell. I could easily spend $5,000 on these reports. OR I could post a $200 bounty on Google Answers and likely get an answer -- continually raising it until I did.
I'm obviously in the computer hardware business. But most any business could find these services useful. Niche reports such as the one I mentioned are very, very expensive.
Google should never have abandoned Answers. With a 10% Google Fee and some marketing towards business men, Answers could have been profitable.
see: digitimes.com, stratfor.com, et al