One of the few triumphs Yahoo has had over Google in the past few years is Yahoo Answers, which is one of Yahoo’s fastest-growing properties. Meanwhile, the more academic (and lumbering) Google Answers was shut down in 2006 when Google figured out that nobody wants to pay “researchers” to do Google searches for them. Some of those researchers went on to start UClue. But now the Google Operating System blog has uncovered some evidence suggesting that Google itself is going to revive Google Answers as a new service called Google Q&A. Excerpt:
Google intends to relaunch the question-answering service Google Answers, which was closed last year. . . . Google Q&A, code-named Confucius, no longer has paid experts and works in a similar way with Yahoo Answers. Google Q&A was launched in Russia in June and in China, two months later.
The way the service in Russia works is that you get points based on how good your answers are. So instead of paying with money, you pay with reputation points. No official word from Google as to whether or not this relaunch is actually happening in the U.S. But AOL is also getting into the game with its recent acquisition of Yedda. Still, Yahoo answers already has so much traction that Google really has to come up with something new to move the ball forward. Maybe it should just launch a service where Larry and Sergey answer all your questions.
Google’s answers to specific questions always has the same effect on me too!
As a founder of my own Q&A site (Fluther.com) I’ve been following this story closely.
I used to hypothesize that Google pulled their original Q&A product because in someways it cannibalized search itself, but now it seems clear that they are lumbering forward.
However, from the looks of their Russian offering, they are making another conservative copy of Yahoo Answers. Personally, I find this somewhat relieving, because I think Yahoo Answers is the “Altavista” of Q&A.
Ben Finkel
Fluther.com Founder & CEO
Q&A is dead, has been, always will be. Social networking is where it’s at. The day that Facebook or MySpace launches a serious Q&A component…is the day I’ll be concerned.
For example, our Q&A site gets 1.2 million visitors a month. The photos section is more has as many actions per visitor, on average, as our questions area. And we have 10x the number of questions as photos.
You do realize, that Uclue was built on Askpert from W3matter, which is the same engineer (Ericson Smith) that also built FunAdvice, and co-founder of our company?
And, I worked at Yahoo (on Answers among other things), and worked at InfoSearch Media, before they bought Answerbag.
It’s the same people, imho, running around in the space…and, from the slowing growth on Yahoo Answers, it’s clear that Q&A is about connecting & networking as much as it is about getting an answer.
We have developed a Q&A concept in the local search space. Using IP telephony and open-source Asterisk we are able to alert any of the 25 million businesses in our database of relevant customer questions in real-time. Relevancy is based on location and business category.
Luis Pereira
AskPoodle.com Founder & CEO
Seems like no one is working on paid answer site? anyone?
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Its definitely a tough ask to take on Yahoo Answers.
But the points for answers thing has been done (see http://www.expe...ts-exchange.com) … we need innovation.
Is Google Answers being brought back as Knol?
Looks interesting and much more impressive than Answers
http://googlebl...contribute.html
Seems like the large Q&A sites stumble because they are too big, requiring too general of an audience (for both those with questions and with answers). I think the small, more focused Q&A sites are doing quite well. Look at webmasterworld.com, mathfiles.com, carspace.com, and others….
I didn’t care for Google’s or Yahoo’s Q&A features… they got lots of eyeballs, sure, but the users/demographic is so diverse it didn’t work for me.
LinkedIn’s Answers section is one of their biggest “wins,” imho. The ability to send questions to people in your network AND have the rest of the LI users see it is pretty powerful. Posting questions (especially if you have more than a few network connections) is powerful for two reason: to get answers (of course), and to reach out to your contacts, with a good reason.
Perhaps it’s because people on LI go there with a more serious purpose than just poking around the web… I’m sure others have different reasons, but for me, the best place to throw questions or offer answers is in LI.
Jason Alba
CEO – JibberJobber.com
Author – I’m on LinkedIn — Now What???
good sign. a bit of competition is good. yahoo! answers db has grown too wildly and is becoming unusable. google would surely bring precision to q&a, which should get yahoo moving again.
Jeremy of FunAnswers wrote:
> it’s clear that Q&A is about connecting & networking as much
> as it is about getting an answer.
I guess that sums it up perfectly. There are Q&A sites such as Uclue, Ask Metafilter, Wikipedia Reference Desk and the former Google Answers, that are actually about getting an answer.
Then there are the rest; the social Q&A sites. FunAdvice is a nicely-executed example of the genre, that’s for sure.
LinkedIn Answers is interesting, because it straddles the fence. It’s about answers AND about networking. It will be interesting to see how it fares once the novelty has worn off.
By the way, don’t underestimate the social aspect of the serious answers sites. The participants at Wikipedia Reference Desk are earning and strutting their gift-economy “smarts-cred”. And a Google Answers commenter once described discussions in the comments of Google Answers as the perfect conversation – erudite, witty, everyone gets to finish what they say without being interrupted, generally polite and genial, and always interesting.
At Uclue, more than five percent of visitors stay for over an hour per visit. That’s not gonna happen without some kind of social engagement.
For a persuasive argument as to why Yahoo answers (and similar services) are fundamentally flawed, see Jacob Leibenluft’s recent article in Slate: http://www.slat....com/id/2179393
Other than getting more internet traffic (though God knows why Google would need it at this point) I can’t see Google Q&A as adding much value as far as useful knowledge on the internet is concerned.
@5: Stephen
Actually, paid answer sites already exist. I remember seeing more than a few a few months back.
I was the first product manager for Yahoo! Answers when it launched 2 years ago. We knew then that Google just doesn’t have it in their DNA to build a social site, and poured our efforts into making Y! Answers fun & social, instead of getting too academic about whether or not you get the right answer every time. What we found was that along with all the usual trolling and infantile behavior – a vast majority of people used Answers to really help other people with little tidbits of their life & experience that could be used to solve real problems and questions people had. You could write a whole treatise on whether or not the point system/awards, etc. had anything to do with it, but at its core – its about believing in the inherent goodness/wisdom of people. And Google just doesn’t have it in them to do that. I no longer work for Yahoo!, so this is just my independent 2 cents.
yahoo answers sux