The Google blog will be saying “no more questions” to Google Answers:

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.

I checked out but never used Google Answers which differed from other Q&A systems in that it costs money to receive answers. While I’m not opposed to paying for an answer to something, I can usually find the answer by digging through the search engines or asking somebody I know.

Yahoo Answers [Hmm review] is currently at the top of the online Q&A sites and I’ve queried this a few times over the last year. I spent a month beta testing the Microsoft response Live QnA and haven’t really used it since. I reviewed Amazon Askville a month ago. No return there since either.

Others are saying
Mohamed Amine Chatti: “I would rather use Google or Yahoo! main search engine which are getting increasingly better to get a quick answer, or directly ask someone that I know s/he might have the answer.”
A five star Google Answers researcher peers into how the system might have been flawed by not requiring a certaim amount of involvement and ongoing participation.
Pramit Singh: “I was surprised to learn that only 800 or so people participated in Google Answers. Therein lays the answer. A recent Oprah Winfrey session on Yahoo Answers got more than 20,000 participants.”
ZDnet’s Larry Dignan: “It shows the company can cut its losses on a project that may not be delivering–a critical skill for all companies. Cutting losses is a cog in solid project management.”
Don Dodge: “Who wants to wait for an answer to a search query? Any wait beyond half a second becomes intolerable for most users. Secondly, how can an answer service be profitable and scale?”
Mark Evans wonders if this is a sign Google will start nuking other projects: “Who knows, maybe this move suggests Google will be more pragmatic about rolling out new services rather than slapping stuff on the wall and seeing if it sticks.”
Haochi Chen who also points to the Google Answers thread below writes on his Googlified blog: “It’s really sad to see Google Answers being shut down. Unlike Google X, Answers has been around for years, even though I don’t use it at all.”
Via Google Answers bowler-ga on 23 Oct 2006 14:50 PDT: “The quality of GA has become diluted with spam questions that are conceivably attempts from credit card thieves to verify the validity of stolen credit card numbers, webmasters realizing that a mention of their website in a GA question may boost their ranking in the search results (although this may have been resolved), and the disappearance of researchers such as yourself.”
Rex Hammock thinks Wikipedia is the main reason for GA demise.

The value in Q&A sites
What I think could/will someday be useful with these Q&A sites is when they integrate the data with regular search results. I’m admittedly a little less enthusiastic now that Google who was receiving Q&A data people were paying for couldn’t figure out how to better integrate this data with their search results. They didn’t help the project by not advertising it very well. I’m curious if this announcement merely means they will be back with a free service to compete against the other two thirds of the GYM trio?

Do you use any of the Q&A services? How often? Why/why not?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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