Google Outgrows Google Answers, Shuts It Down
The company didn't provide a direct reason for shuttering the service, although the engineers who wrote the blog post implied Google was reconsidering its goals for the project. Google Answers always seemed like the odd man out in Google's strategy because it didn't take advantage of the Internet's scale in the most efficient way. Google Answers allowed anyone to ask a question but only allowed a limited number of "research experts" to answer a question. Thus Google Answers could never compete with the greater growth curve of social apps like Yahoo Answers, which welcomes all comers to participate in both ends of question-and-answer didactics. While some may see the end of Google Answers as a sign of defeat versus Yahoo Answers, I would argue that Google simply outgrew its pet project. One of the original goals for Google was to discover what users wanted to learn about, but Google no longer needs Google Answers to figure that out. More recent projects like Google Custom Search Engine and apps like Google Docs and Google Desktop Search offer much better measurements of intention and attention. |
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