Another Google 20 percent time tool has made its way into the public in the form of a Q&A crowdsourcing app.

The search engine has released Google Moderator to let users of Google's App Engine cloud computing application platform decide what questions should be asked.

Google Moderator has its roots as a tool created to ease the Q&A process for Google's several "tech talks" on computer science subjects such as ranking images based on text queries in Google search and, what else?, machine learning. Hey, who better to facilitate artificial intelligence than Google?

Google Moderator creator Taliver Heath, a platform engineer with the company wrote in a blog post that tech talks eventually enjoyed so many participants that there just wasn't enough time to accommodate everyone for the crucial Q&A sessions. Also, he wrote:

There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn't clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked. And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.

Heath said he created a tool in his 20 percent time that let Googlers attending a tech talk submit a question to the cloud and let other participants vote on whether or not that question should be asked.

This project, code-named "Dory" for the curiosity-filled fish in "Finding Nemo," enabled the most popular and relevant questions to rise to the top so that the presenter or the moderator of an event could run the discussion more efficiently. Dory branched out to Google's weekly all-hands company meeting and other important talks.

Google released it for free yesterday on Google App Engine. Users can ask a question and, in typical Wiki-like crowdsourcing fashion, readers can check the X box to vote the question down, check the check box for yes, opt to skip the question or flag it as inappropriate.

Some suggested series include, what Android Application would users like to see; what question(s) should Senators Obama and McCain answer to the American people; and questions to ask a Google engineer.

What Web services would you like Google to create? Google Operating System's Ionut Alex Chitu created a series for readers to suggest what services they would like to see from Google here.

I poked around on this series and voted "yes" for SMS notifications for Gmail, push mail on iPhone for Gmail and the ability to sort in Gmail, all valid requests.

Users who want to try it out may go to the Google Moderator beta Web page here and sign in with their Google Account.