Google bids adieu to Google Answers

BANGALORE: Google has decided to shut down its 4-year-old, paid, expert-driven service, Google Answers.

With Google Answers service, a user was able to submit a question and specify how much he was willing to pay for an answer. Google Answer was launched in April 2002.

Google said it would stop accepting questions by this week and stop accepting new answers for existing questions by this year-end. However, the existing questions and answers would be available.

In a blog posted on the official Google blog on Tuesday, two software engineers with the company, Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, said that Google Answers was a great experiment, which provided them with a lot of material for developing future products to serve their users.

"Google is a company fuelled 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 crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds," Fikes and Baugher wrote in the blog titled, Adieu to Google Answers.

Meanwhile, analysts consider the paid business model of Google Answers has made the search giant to shut the service. Yahoo Answers, a free service launched in December last year, gets more hits than Google Answers.

Microsoft launched a similar service in August, the Windows Live QnA.

© CyberMedia News