Google Answers Is Dead. Any Questions?

Just as the title says it: we won’t find any answers from Google’s service any longer, as it has been officially closed.

Google Answers has been for years the place where you could find what Google’s search engine couldn’t. It was the place where researchers with expertise in online searching were looking for information in your place, of course, in return for a certain amount of money. Obviously, if you had trouble in finding a husband or a wife, Google Answers was not the place to ask on how to get him/her. So, even research experts at Google have limitations…

And sometimes, the price posted for a question was too little to justify the time commitment required for an answer. Payment was important in this equation: the more research was required to find an answer, the higher the price you had to set for your question. Three-quarters of your question price went directly to the Researcher who answered your question; the other 25 percent went to Google to support the service.

Up until now, there has been a non-refundable listing fee of $0.50 per question plus an additional 'price' that you had to set for your question, to reflect how much you were willing to pay for an answer. That price could have been as low as $2 or as high as $200.

Setting a price too low to compensate for the time required might have resulted in your question not receiving an answer. The more you were willing to pay, the more likely your question was to get an answer quickly.

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. More than 800 people participated at this project over the years, according to Google’s official blog.

And now...it’s all gone with the wind…“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.”

“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.”

Compared to Yahoo’s similar, free service Google Answers is totally pwnd. "At present, Yahoo Answers is over 50 times the market share [in visits] of the new Live QnA and 24 times of Google Answers," noted Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, on his company's blog.

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