Google has announced that Google Answers, a site where users pay an experienced web researcher to answer their questions, will be terminated by the end of the year.
From the Google 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 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.”
Yahoo’s reaction to the news was swift. In fact, they emailed Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington four separate times to gloat about Google’s misfortune and pump up their own, successful Yahoo Answers product.
Will this victory serve as a morale boost for Yahoo? Only time will tell. However, they do have a lot of problems to overcome – if you believe the widely circulated “Peanut Butter Manifesto” that is.
