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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.
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.
No, actually, they're owned by Google, they're pwned by Slashdot. --wix
Has anyone asked if they can keep it open ?
I look forward to the day we can casually type nigger and other words because they no longer mean anything special.
overuse and humor are probably the best way to drain the words of power.
continuing to act like they have power gives them power they don't deserve.
More to the point--- he was parroting text in common troll spam jokes here at Slashdot.
When I was a young naive programmer... I worked in a language with six letter variables.
I had a count field that i wanted to abbreviate. Two letters were reserved for the area (orders, invoices, etc.).
So I dropped the O and and orcunt, incunt, xxcunt. The senior programmer came by and just about had a cow and yet- couldn't explain what the problem was. He finally just said trust him and change it to cont so I did. there was no internet back then so it was a little difficult to find out what the problem was.
I get the impression that the parent poster really just sees nigger as any other mildly derogatory term (and to be fair- a ton of blacks use it daily without any problem- it's a like a special reserved word they can use playfully, insultingly, innocuously but is magically derogatory if anyone else uses).
As more whites and blacks, and mexicans and blacks, and asians and blacks date, marry, and interbreed, the term becomes hard to define anyway.
And personally, I prefer humor about anything (death, aids, my having cancer, me losing my hair, me being a geek) over getting all huffy and serious about it. Only through humor are we going to destroy the true racism by showing just how stupid it is to think you can know about a person because of their skin color.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.