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Friday, December 1

Goodbye Google Answers, Hello Yahoo!

Google have recently announced they will be shutting down their answers service by the end of this year. While the website will remain online, Google said it will not be accepting any new questions.

As Google have not given an official reason for the close, speculation seems to suggest the closure is a result of the dominance of Yahoo! Answers.

Source: Search Engine Watch

While both services aim to serve the same purpose, they go about it in very different ways. The Google service asks for a small fee in order to have your question answered by '500 carefully screened researches', while the Yahoo! variant relies on the community to answer users' questions for free. The dominance of Yahoo! Answers seems to follow the online trend towards social networks,
"We didn't set out to end Google Answers," said Yahoo! spokeswoman Melissa Rische. "Yahoo saw an opportunity to build a community for users seeking knowledge, whereas Google's effort was something different, more one-sided."

Google Answers started as the pet project of Google founder Larry Page. Powered by a small 4 person team, the idea was turned into reality in less than four 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.", said Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, Google software engineers. "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."

Will the Yahoo! service continue to dominate or will it in turn be surpassed by a different community-based answer service? If you have used either service, let us know what you think!

4 Comments

At 10:50 AM, Anonymous said...: There goes my retirement plans.

Why shouldn't you earn a living as a specialised net researcher?

- barista
At 10:55 PM, IMAutoPilot said...: Our search engine marketing company has used both services for research. As usual, you get what you pay for. We always found Google to be better, but they did not always have a response. Yahoo had plenty of responses but ... you're dealing with a lot of rookies there.
At 9:53 AM, Filatelis said...: GOOD Yahoo is better than Google. I had worst experience with Google my Ads running uncontrolable. Clicks running without I even could not see the Ads and Google answer only Sorry but without correction of the Cost. Terrible Google !
At 4:54 PM, chris said...: Yahoo needs some kind of help there search results are not that good there maps suck and there adwords dont do anything plus you can py to be displayed better on the natural search so therefore googles got it right cause they answer with the winning results.I hope yahoo does im prove but first they have to get things right.I f they want to hire me i can help them ill answer reality here.
Freedom of speech is good from a bay area dj http://www.californiadiscjockeys.com

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Goodbye Google Answers, Hello Yahoo!

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