Google Ending Answer Service Just When Social Market Gets Going
Forbes and about 1,000 other news sites today announced that Google is ending its foray into the online answer business. They are attempting to consolidate their services, so that they are more streamlined, and possibly more attractive to investors. What I find interesting is that they are removing a service that is really starting to take off. User generated content is getting huge and will only get bigger. Yahoo! Answers is one example of how the trend can go. They are actually putting “answers” into their search results. This is great. Real people offering real answers in a search result page.
While Google’s product made questioners pay experts for quality responses, Yahoo! Answers, launched in December 2005, is free. Yahoo!’s product gets 24 times more traffic than Google Answers, according to research firm Hitwise. Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) also integrates answers to user-generated questions into results in its search engine, and has solicited questions from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and physicist Stephen Hawking.
Maybe Google is planning on doing something else with its mountain o’ cash. Operating system?
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