Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Google Answers Bites the Dust
One of my favorite little "hidden secrets" in the Google empire has been shuttered. Google announced today that they're shutting down Google Answers, the service where a team of pros answered user questions for a fee. Google calls it a failed experiment, but my guess is that the company simply prefers easy automation over more complex human input. Farewell!
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3 comments:
Hi Mike. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? I think the graph in this post pretty much sums up why Google pulled out...:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/11/google_answers.html
I think the numbers speak to the fact that this was one of Google's useful services that never got enough exposure. Google does such a great jog protecting the core search business that it underexposes most of its other services -- that would be real winners if they were standalone sites.
I agree, sort of. Don't forget that Google doesn't like to clutter their main page up with anything, so all those other services get buried. It's a trade-off. I tend to think their clean interface has been part of their success to date, but perhaps there's a compromise to be made.
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