Google Has No Answers

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1. None
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 9:49 am

   Natali,

   800 is how many people were hired by Google to answer other people’s questions, not how many members of the general public visited the site. Google Answers is different from Yahoo Answers, in that questioners set prices for Google-approved experts to research their questions. Yahoo has been much more successful with a free free-for-all.

2. Tony Gentile
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 9:50 am

   Just a guess, but I’d assume the 800 ppl he referred to was the number of researchers, not the number of users asking questions… either way, I’ve never seen them aggressively promote or drive traffic to the service.

3. dan
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 9:53 am

   Wow, were you serious about not getting the 800 number? I though you were joking.

4. Natali Del Conte
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 9:56 am

   Thanks for your comments. I didn’t mean 800 participants. I meant 800 answerers. Sorry I was unclear. Changed to avoid confusion.

5. met
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 9:57 am

   Wouldn’t blogs such as techcrunch become obselete when people learn to navigate the web better?

6. Ian
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 9:58 am

   Natali,

   Congrats on joining Techcrunch.

   The community surrounding Yahoo Answers have helped promote the service and virally spread the word. For example, my mother (non-teche) has even used Yahoo answers after hearing about it from a friend.

7. Aditya
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 10:08 am

   [quote]
   “So far no word on how Yahoo Answers is doing in comparison but isn’t it possible that community asking services such as these will become extinct as people learn to better navigate the Web themselves?”
   [/quote]

   No, it wouldn’t. In my opinion, such services are providing a new dimension for acquiring information. Already, I use yahoo-answers for many direct questions instead of internet search. I can instant transation for free and ask advice on what to do with bird chicks.

8. ihaveon-answer
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 10:12 am

   I n+have

9. jay
   

   November 29th, 2006 at 10:15 am

   >>isn’t it possible that community asking services such as these will become >>extinct as people learn to better navigate the Web themselves?”

   >In my opinion, such services are providing a new dimension for acquiring >information.

   Exactly. They’ll only become extinct once all information is on the web, and perfectly searchable. For now, they’re a great way to get more info online.

10. Yaniv Golan
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 10:19 am

    I don’t think such communities will become extinct. On the contrary.

    It was said in a different context, but I feel this is relevant here: “We’ve gotten to a point where we have to be reminded that all knowledge does not spring from Google; that true wisdom comes from the most basic human urge to understand the world around us, to see life through the eyes and voices of others. To connect.”

    Community asking services, or social knowledge sharing as we call it at Yedda (http://yedda.com) shine when the answer is simply not available on the web, or it is hidden in the invisible web:

    Searching for copy of 1968 Italian film, Colpo di Sole (1968)

    (An often quoted “fact” from the corporations world is that ~70% of the accumulated knowledge is actually stored in people’s heads and not in the enterprise information systems).

    But even when the information is available on the web, it could be that you simply don’t know what it is that you’re looking for:

    Protect a service business idea

    Or maybe you want ideas and opinions:

    Can we stop the overuse of paper?

    Or just a *human* answer:

    Long distance relationships
    Any ideas for improving my chances?

    Search engines are great, and the results they provide are getting better and better, but even when they do come up with the relevant information, they leave it up to you to integrate the different bits and to interpret them in your own personal context. With services like Yahoo Answers and Yedda, the answers people provide you are already “tailored” to your own specific circumstances, because, well, that’s what people do when asked a question

11. jonw
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 10:29 am

    maybe it got scared about the Bitwine.com launch.

12. leftnipple
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 10:45 am

    Oh look, google tried something and failed. maybe the analysts on wallstreet will stop giving this company the benefit of the doubt. they act like it’s a forgone conclusion that google will beat microsoft w/ their online office suite. yahoo is treated like a dead company.

    truth is, google has a lot of money and their business strategy, apart from paid search, is to throw spaghetti on the wall and see if it sticks. that’s what they’ve been doing since day 1. whether or not projects like google maps or google office, etc. will pan out financially is anyone’s guess…..but the stock is over 500 bucks! ridiculous.

13. People Finder
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 10:48 am

    Well, I would say BitWine.com won’t pull this off either.

14. Jimmy
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    Wow… this is like a paraphrase of the exact post CenterNetworks made about an hour ago…. the quote, the yahoo answers comparisons…

    You really should attribute sources sometimes, TC writers… it would clear this kind of thing up.

15. Amit Chowdhry
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:11 am

    Google Answers also required you to pay the Google Answers Team to answer your questions for you. This is why I would never switch from Yahoo! to Google Answers. Also, Google Answers was only limited to their 800 person Answer Team whereas Yahoo! Answers allowed its millions of users to comment on the question and the most popular response would be placed on top.

    Yahoo! Answers definetely has more credibility on this one. I would have to say that Google Answers won’t be missed. Nice try for Larry Page though and not a bad try for being one of Google’s first services.

    Wikipedia has some pretty good coverage of Google Answers too:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers

16. mike
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:17 am

    i like that google made a play in the answers space, recognized that it wasn’t a success and rather than waste a bunch of time, they’re pulling the plug *or* pulled the plug. a big part of innovation is failing and knowing its ok to fail, learn from the failure and move on.

    my immediate impression of bitwine wine was it looks complex. now that was only my first impression, it might very well be easy once you start peeling back the layers. finding advisors, meetings them and all of this done with what looks like the kind of headsets that they wear at carl’s jr looks odd to me.

    try this..

    SMS any question that starts with who, what, where, why, when, should, does, is, are do or did to 66937 (mozes). try asking ‘where can i buy one of those headsets that they wear at carls’ jr.?’

    get a response wherever you are on your mobile device.

    if you want to monitor other answers, go to http://www.mozes.com/mob

17. Richard Ball
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:18 am

    The timing of this shutdown is interesting. Yahoo has recently started integrating their answers product into their search results. This could help give Yahoo an edge in social search. Perhaps they’ll begin integrating del.icio.us results into search as well? Or, they could use the collective intelligence of del.icio.us bookmarks to develop a search ranking algorithm that’s better than Google’s use of PageRank. What indicates more that a site is authoritative (or at least very useful) - dropping a link or saving a bookmark? Google’s PageRank counts links as “votes” for a URL. Yahoo could count bookmarks as “votes” for a URL. It’d be interesting to see if such an algorithm would produce more relevant search results. At the very least, it might help Yahoo with their “peanut butter” problem.

18. Jenny
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:21 am

    May I suggest Omgili - http://www.omgili.com for finding answers; It leverages both Yahoo Answers and Google Answers among ten of thousands of other forums.

19. Richard
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:26 am

    “isn’t it possible that community asking services such as these will become extinct as people learn to better navigate the Web themselves?”

    Possible, but very unlikely. What Aditya said.

    Plus, for the quote to be true, you’d be expecting too much of your fellow humans

20. landmammal
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:26 am

    I have found useful information on Yahoo answers. I think these types of tools are going to stay around.

21. Steve M.
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:29 am

    Two important points:

    #1. Yahoo Answers is doing wonderfully; quickly becoming a monster hit. According to the Sept ‘06 issue of Business 2.0, it’s now the second most popular Internet reference site after Wikipedia (per Comscore); with an impressive 10+ million unique visitors/month.

    #2. Because the press isn’t currently “big” on Yahoo, though, don’t expect the kind of positive headlines that media darling Google would receive over such a successful new service…or much attention either to (let’s call it what it is, shall we) this Google failure.

    Unbalanced reporting via-a-vis Yahoo/Google?

    This is just one more example.

22. Amit
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:45 am

    No, these community answering services will not go out of business. I am a big fan of Yahoo answers because it works. They can improve the service by rewarding the people with “best answers.” I.e: ca$h.

    -Amit

23. Drama 2.0
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 11:52 am

    It’s about time that Google started pulling the plug on its failures. Thus far, Google is a one-trick pony with a single revenue revenue stream. Their increasingly homogenous and non-diverse culture is a worry, as is the fact that costs are now growing faster than revenues. Their lifeblood (AdWords) is vulnerable to a slowdown in the economy and advertising market, as well as to click fraud concerns.

    On the other hand, Yahoo is structured as more of a media company and has more diversity in its revenue streams. Yahoo Answers is doing very well and while it’s unclear if this is impacting the bottom line yet, or if it will in a significant way, it does show that Yahoo is still able to build homegrown product successes while Google has been unable to outside of search. The way the market has treated Google versus Yahoo provides a potentially good investment opportunity. If Yahoo would just get rid of Semel and replace him with a strong leader with relevant experience I might personally look more closely at Yahoo as an investment.

24. Matthew Dillingham
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 12:03 pm

    Social Search is the way of the future. Search Engines will eventually let more and more people affect their rankings through results feedback as well as by user created content. By what I can see, algorithms can only customize and tweak results to a certain point. The tipping point will be user feedback rankings. It seems, for some reason, people still want to interact with others and get their opinions, instead of 100% reliance on computer generated search results. I would think that Yahoo! Answers and other Q&A sites will become more and more popular, and eventually be seen in everyday search results instead of sporadically peppered in as the search engines test the concept.

    Check out Garrett French’s article in this issue of Search Marketing Standard. He has a good take on what seems to be happening in the industry.

25. Patricia
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 12:29 pm

    Unless something like this can answer why a handsome guy I met hasn’t called me, or gets me the right contact for a company I’m trying to work with, it is not worth even a meager $2.50 for me to ask. I will just figure it out free of charge on my own.

26. Steve
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 12:30 pm

    “Isn’t it possible that community asking services such as these will become extinct as people learn to better navigate the Web themselves?”

    Umm, obviously you don’t read Techcrunch much. ;

27. Johnathan
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 12:41 pm

    They are getting ready to release a new version of Google answers. That’s why they are taking this down. They regularly talk about how Yahoo is experiencing new traffic from answers, and want something similar.

    its sad really, working here, seeing how much google copies Yahoo.

28. Sergio
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 12:45 pm

    Another example that it’s not just about innovation or ideas, but also about execution.

29. Shii
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    I think you guys are missing something important. Yahoo Answers is popular, yes, but have you ever tried to get anything useful from that site? There is absolutely no wisdom in crowds there. You might as well ask random people on MySpace what they think.

    Google Answers was a legitimate research tool. At its height, you could basically ask them any sort of complicated question, and if the price was right they would research all the details of it for you. You could get information on there that was difficult to find on Google. Yahoo Answers, not so much.

30. verevi
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 12:55 pm

    I just started keeping up with ask.metafilter.com. Great questions and answers… Pretty interesting and usually high quality. This type of service remains useful.

31. Denver Wang
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 12:56 pm

    Google has no answers !!!!

    What a cool title… yes the execution is more important than ideas and innovations, and the technology is only the tools for bostting up the business.

32. Pran
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 1:13 pm

    Google has announced so many products and services, many of which have been failures (relatively speaking). Its good to see that they are planning to pull the plug on Google Answers. Wonder what’s next in the Q?

33. Denver Wang
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

    the web search ?

34. Shii
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 1:43 pm

    Just saw this post on Reddit which you can also apply to Google and Yahoo Answers.

    http://www.andyrutledge.com/anti-social-media.php

35. anthropocentric
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 1:46 pm

    I congratulate Google for having the guts to take something down and move on to something new.

36. Amanuel
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 2:01 pm

    The idea of ‘pay for answers’ has never worked, I suspect google may be coming back with something more substantial as a response to Yahoo Answers which is not that good…but I’m biased

    The only place ‘pay for answers’ seems to be working is some UK cell based service….don’t have URL for it…but on the UK service it is about getting a response while you are in physically constrained place and not in front of your computer…ie worth paying for. For example, you don’t dial 411 at home, but do when you are outside on your cell…same thing with answers.

    Cheers.

37. sam
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 2:27 pm

    patricia… #24..

    you just raised an interesting issue/possible point that i can’t seem to shake.. regarding your finding the person in a company that you’d want to talk to..

    just how much would people be willing to pay for the name/access/information/etc… of the key person/hiring manager that they want to talk to, assuming that they got the job…

    interesting question!!

38. Noni Moos
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 2:41 pm

    Yhaoo is doing much better than Google for quite some times. Yahoo made the move just in the direction BitWine is now conceptually leading.

    I am talking about Real-Time. By adding game like features yahoo accelerated the response time for getting answers. And made it fun. Plus they allowed people that have the information to answer where Google were using paid Information Searchers.

    Yet, BitWine takes the few more problems out of the equation.

    Question and Answer Flexibility

    In a direct interaction between Client and Advisor the Asker can modify and customise the question few times in 5 seconds based on inputs from the Advisor; try doing that on Yahoo.

    Trust

    Can you trust someone with an answer, where you do not really know who he is and what he really knows.

    By adding real-time Audio & Video BitWine broke yet another barrier. Now you see the person giving the advice and you can verify that he is who he is by asking more questions and qualifying his knowledge before you pay a cent.

    Rich Media

    This opens the market for a whole new set of services.
    Try giving a guitar lesson over chat or a phone Line.
    Try explaining to a DIY personality how to re-build a carburetor using text or chat.

    Cash.

    If you try asking a real business question in Yahoo it is more likely that will not get an answer, Try something like “What is the percentage of overlapping users between PayPal & Skype” you will probably get no good answers.

    The payment enables more serious people to justify their time answering, specifically the fact that anyone can set its own rate.

    Real Time Payment.
    I do not know how they did it, but BitWine pays instantly using PayPal.

    Given all that, at this point it is just a question of time until they start wining big.

39. Patricia
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 3:01 pm

    @ sam, well, linkedin (www.linkedin.com) does this, sort of - you can pay $10 to directly connect with people and it’s said to have a lot of high level tech execs on it. But for me personally, I wouldn’t pay for information I can get for free, ever. Maybe if I’m in a hurry, but that’s a big maybe

40. Patricia
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 3:02 pm

    let me add, finding out why handsome guy doesn’t call me? priceless.

    (just kidding)

41. Rose Water
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 5:58 pm

    Google answers and yahoo answers is/was great for SEO.

42. J Evans
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 6:35 pm

    In response to Google’s announcement that they are shutting down the Google Answers service, researchers have banded together to petition Google to keep GA alive. Please sign.

    http://www.petitiononline.com/ganswers/
    Keep Google Answers Alive

    To: Google

    The Google Answers service has helped many people during its four and a half years of existence, and it continues to do so. Researchers and unpaid commenters formed a community which should not be discarded lightly. Many repeat users were able to easily find answers to difficult questions thanks to the service. Furthermore, Google Answers proved that a living could be made working on the Internet alone, as many researchers worked on the site as their sole source of income.

    We, the undersigned, believe that Google should continue to provide this valuable community service to the Internet.

    Sincerely,

    The Undersigned

43. Wes
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 7:57 pm

    I think there are people who are always going to be found the answer services good for them.

    Its good to have variety and those who want to do searches can still do the search.

44. Amar
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 8:47 pm

    Another example of teams at Google having hard time communicating with each other. One team announces Google Answers being scrapped and Google Docs and Spreadsheet team announces in their “New Features” just released section, a new “Google LookUp” function that accesses the Google Q&A database. http://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html.

    Why would you build a new feature on a service that you are announcing to scrap the same week.

45. Peter Cooper
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 8:58 pm

    I was the first person to blog about this (even before Google!) minutes after I got the mail from Google, as I’m a researcher, but I really wanted to send it to TechCrunch (since no-one reading my blog cares whatsoever). However, I couldn’t find any way of sending a ‘lead’ / ‘tip’ to TechCrunch easily. I have Michael’s e-mail address somewhere, but is there a nice way to send a tip to the entire TechCrunch editorial team? The “Contact” page is only useful for companies wanting to be profiled, it seems.

46. Pramit Singh
    

    November 29th, 2006 at 10:14 pm

    I asked about Google Answers and 800 people yesterday on this site, on the post regarding Bitwine. In fact, MediaVidea covererd it before most other sources.

47. David
    

    November 30th, 2006 at 1:26 am

    While Yahoo Answers’s sucess is something that cannot be argued, the numbers that they have updated you with might have a different interpretation since every answer that contains the following text (and only that text) “Oh cool” is probably also included in the 160 million answers.

    There is a great deal of single worded (and sometimes two worded) responses that Yahoo Answers call “Answers” which are actually comments (or less).

    I think that the real parameter here is to see how many questions with best answer and reasonable rating they have. This is the true measurement of the site’s effectiveness.

48. ReeTanjuatco
    

    November 30th, 2006 at 3:42 am

    Hmm I don’t know. Didn’t Google just bought JotSpot Wiki? With Wikipedia at the helm as the #1 online reference site, I think Google would want that piece of action if not overtake Wikipedia.org How about Googpedia in the works. Forget Yahoo Answers, that monstrosity of a site has FULL of spam in it, its not as authoritative as Wikipedia and information is just aggregated from other sites and not from Yahoo Answer itself. Furthermore it doesnt have the quality safeguard and editing security that Wikipedia offers. IMHO Yahoo Answers is nothing but a listing of questions asked by users and answers OF users AS SEARCHED in the web (using Google of course). Yahoo has nothing to be proud about that since it still trails Google in search period.

    What do you think the displaced 800+ Google employees (with Ph. Ds) are doing? Playing ping pong? I guess not. Google is just intelligent enough with what it has and what it hasn’t done. Wikipedia has been slow as of late and have anyone used the wikipedia search? it’s an abomination. I’d like to see an online pedia that can deliver fast and razor sharp results as the Google main site.

49. Sean
    

    November 30th, 2006 at 7:10 am

    Check out Yahoo’s response to the Google Answers closing: http://buzzrun.com/2006/11/30/.....ting-down/

50. Kasey
    

    November 30th, 2006 at 9:04 am

    This is a huge industry, look at the article that was in the WSJ about Gerson Lehrman Group. http://online.wsj.com/article/.....jie/6month

51. Dheeraj
    

    November 30th, 2006 at 10:32 am

    Hi

    I started a very similar service when I left my job in 2002 called “anyquestionanswered.com” - just to pay my bills till I got back on my feet - I promoted it using adwords and link-exchange and got paid through paypal - closed up shop in about 3 months, but in that time, I answered about 1500 questions and made about $10,000 for myself - even though it was good money, I could see that it was not a sustainable model as people became better at searching, and searching itself became easier, my value in the “answer” chain diminished. Yahoo’s got a great model now that advertising is a good revenue driver- and I’m surprised Google didn’t emulate it or retool instead of shutting down. I heard Baidu has a social search element integrated into their search engine that is just CRUSHING Google in search relevance in the difficult to search Chinese language web ecosystem. I wonder if they will relaunch using newly aquired tools from JotSpot (wikis) leveraging their Orkut and YouTube social sites?

52. Marcel
    

    November 30th, 2006 at 1:10 pm

    Google got something else planned… .

53. Peter Capek
    

    November 30th, 2006 at 4:33 pm

    Yahoo! Answers may have more page views, and if that was Yahoo!’s goal in creating it, they achieved it. But it’s useless for getting answers that are of any substance, or correct, or reliable. It’s full (I’d guess 90% or more) of teenieboppers who want to rack up points with inane comments to unanswerable questions.

    I only hope that Marcel is correct, as I think he is, that Google is working on something better.

54. Animesh Bansriyar
    

    November 30th, 2006 at 11:01 pm

    Natali Says:
    “So far no word on how Yahoo Answers is doing in comparison but isn’t it possible that community asking services such as these will become extinct as people learn to better navigate the Web themselves?”

    There are a few startups trying to automate Question-Answering as is my startup. If Question-Answering has to become mainstream it has to be automated instead of relying on Humans to do it. The technology for Scalable Information Retrieval was always there but automated Question-Answering algorithms have a long way to go, and I think Google is doing something in this field. Either Acquisitions / development?

    I have long believed that the primary factor deifferentiating Y/G is Yahoo leaning towards user-generated content and Google towards automated algorithms doing the same thing.

    -Animesh, MirrorZen Software

55. danny White
    

    December 1st, 2006 at 1:22 pm

    I have been using http://www.jyve.com which has all that bitwine has and more. This site has lots of member participation and eveyone is chat and skype enabled.
    I have made money and spent money on this site and it works. Found it by accident, it seems that this is the team that developed the skype card, presence button, browser synch for Skype over the last few years.
    LAst I heard they have close to 90,00 members.

56. Alexander Q.
    

    December 13th, 2006 at 8:49 pm

    Hello everybody. I would like to introduce you to a new concept. Beginning in January of 2007 AssistMeOnline.com will be the new site for questions and answers. Although the website has not technically been launched yet, it is currently viewable at http://www.AssistMeOnline.com It will actually be a re-launch since this website was originally launched in a Beta form in the spring and summer of 2005 with great success. This time it will be better than ever with new features that other companies with a similar service do not provide to its users. More is to come when the official announcement will be made and press releases will be issued. In the meantime all former Google Answers Researchers are invited to apply to become a Representative and join the AssistMeOnline.com network. If anyone has questions or suggestions you may contact us via our website. Comments are also welcome through this forum. Bienvenido AssistMeOnline.com and Sayonara to Google Answers.

57. Shankar Ganesh
    

    December 29th, 2006 at 10:36 pm

    Though there’s some junk, Yahoo! Answers is doing good.