GOODBYE GOOGLE ANSWERS

EN: BLOG.SEARCHENGINEWATCH.COM
SITE:http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061129-050815
FECHA: 29/11/2006

Wow. Google is shutting down its Google Answers service. The company has announced that new questions won't be accepted after the New Year, though the site will continue to let people view the question archives. Killing off the service, which never seemed to catch on much, certainly will help Google seem like it is focusing efforts toward more needed areas. But it still feels like an odd, almost surrendering move in the face of Yahoo Answers being such a success.

Back in April, I did a long roundup on how answering services in general had never really caught on in terms of popularity.

It covered how Google's nearly four year old service generated practically no traffic for Google, plus looked at similar services that came and went.

But in June, I had to admit that my being dubious in terms of Yahoo Answers was off the mark. The service kept notching up tons of traffic, and Yahoo continues to put its weight behind it, to the point of even more integration last week of Yahoo Answers material into regular results.

Look Out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo Answers! from me is my long look at the service and some of the factors in its success. Unlike Google Answers, it doesn't charge. And unlike Google Answers, there are a lot of "answers" that are more discussions happening rather than searches being fulfilled.

Even if there's a lot of chatting going on, I think there's no denying that Yahoo Answers turned into the social success that Yahoo hoped its 360 service or My Web would be. There's a entire active community taking part in Yahoo Answers, and some of those are going to translate into Yahoo searchers.

That action's not lost on Microsoft, which kicked off its Windows Live QnA service in August. I haven't seen a ton of buzz like with Yahoo coming out of it, so maybe lighting only strikes once, in this case. I'm sure Hitwise will run some stats for everyone later today to update us on the space, so watch the blog over there. But you can't help but feel Google may have missed out on what Yahoo managed to tap into.

Then again, killing off Google Answers might ultimately be a way for Google to relaunch with something fresh and radically different. We'll see. Killing it off remains far better than leaving things like Google Voice Search still up with a note to "check back in a little while," when it hasn't run for years. I suspect we'll see Google Catalogs get retired as well -- the last Ikea catalog over there seem to be from 2002. I'd say retiring experiments and services that haven't caught on is less embarrassing than leaving them out there doing badly, so Google making the right choice.
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ADIEU TO GOOGLE ANSWERS

EN: GOOGLEBLOG
SITE:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/adieu-to-google-answers.html
FECHA: 11/28/2006 10:22:00 PM
AUTOR: Posted by Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, Software Engineers

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 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.

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.

If you have a chance, we encourage you to browse through the questions posted over the last 4+ years. 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.

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.