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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.
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.
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.
800 is the number of researchers, not the customers. They are hand picked through a very selective process.
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
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.
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
I get pretty frustrated with Yahoo Answers myself. It takes the longest time to find questions that are serious, interesting, and relevant to me.
On the other hand, the barrier to entry for Google Answers was way too high. You had to pay to ask, and you had to go through a small job interview to answer. Once I found that out, I never touched it again. It wasn't free, so it never developed a community around it. Google should have seen that coming a mile away.
It seems like the way to go would be a two-tiered system. People would be able to ask and answer questions, and eventually if they generate a high enough "trust metric" they would be allowed to answer for-pay questions. People could ask questions for free, or chip in a few bucks to motivate answers. People with insufficient credibility would be allowed to answer as well, but they'd get the "anonymous coward" treatment (e.g. answers not visible by default). Once the question is closed, the person has to select the best answer(s), and the money is divvied up.
Yahoo should learn from World of Warcraft: You can get people addicted to leveling up.
Of course, once you get money involved, people will start looking for ways to game the system.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The general guidelines are documented at
l ines.html#aboutgar
http://answers.google.com/answers/researcherguide
As I was one of the first researchers approved, I can say that they were serious when selecting researchers. After the first 400 researchers, they stopped accepting any more applications. The rest are selected among the "commenters" (ie. those non-researchers who commented on answers).
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
Don't forget about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service which is *sort* of the same thing.
r k
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Tu