Google Answers has no more answers to give

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Thursday, 30 November 2006

There must be celebrating in Yahoo’s offices, with their Yahoo Answers program surging ahead while Google closes down the Google Answers service.

Don’t expect any direct answers from Google’s Answer service which is being shut down since it started in 2002.

According to Google’s blog, “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 blog continues: “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”.

Perhaps Google have realised that the Google search engine usually can provide the answers you need – as long as you ask the right question, something that web surfers have had to learn to do to get the best results from any search engine.

Google are planning on keeping the database of 4+ years of Q&A around for the foreseeable future, and have stopped accepting new questions, however answers can continue to be posted until the end of 2006.

Google has thanked the people that helped make the service possible. According to their blog: “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”.

Google promises to keep on working on new services, but was vague on the true reasons for shutting down the program. The blog concludes by saying that: “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”.

Rest in Peace, Google Answers. We hardly knew ye, and never got around to asking you anything, although we do ask your big brother, the actual Google search engine, questions all the time, often with great success.

Perhaps one day it’ll give us the real answer on why Google Answers is no more.
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