IndustryGoodbye Google Answers

Goodbye Google Answers

answers.png

Wow. Google is shutting down its
Google Answers
service. The company has

announced
that new questions won’t be accepted after the New Year, though
the site will continue to let people view the question archives. Killing off the
service, which never seemed to catch on much, certainly will help Google seem
like it is focusing efforts toward more needed areas. But it still feels like an
odd, almost surrendering move in the face of
Yahoo Answers
being such a success.

Back in April, I did a
long roundup
on how answering services in general had never really caught on in terms of
popularity. It covered how Google’s nearly four year old service generated
practically no traffic for Google, plus looked at similar services that came and
went.

But in June, I had to admit that my being dubious in terms of Yahoo Answers
was off the mark. The service kept notching up tons of traffic, and Yahoo
continues to put its weight behind it, to the point of
even more integration
last week of Yahoo Answers material into regular results.

Look Out
Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo Answers!
from me is my long look at the service
and some of the factors in its success. Unlike Google Answers, it doesn’t
charge. And unlike Google Answers, there are a lot of "answers" that are more
discussions happening rather than searches being fulfilled.

Even if there’s a lot of chatting going on, I think there’s no denying that
Yahoo Answers turned into the social success that Yahoo hoped its 360 service or
My Web would be. There’s a entire active community taking part in Yahoo Answers,
and some of those are going to translate into Yahoo searchers.

That action’s not lost on Microsoft, which kicked off its Windows Live QnA
service in August.
I haven’t seen a ton of buzz like with Yahoo coming out of it, so maybe lighting
only strikes once, in this case. I’m sure Hitwise will run some stats for
everyone later today to update us on the space, so watch the blog
over there (note: numbers now up). But you can’t help but
feel Google may have missed out on what Yahoo managed to tap into.

Then again, killing off Google Answers might ultimately be a way for Google
to relaunch with something fresh and radically different. We’ll see. Killing it
off remains far better than leaving things like
Google Voice Search still up with
a note to "check back in a little while," when it hasn’t run for years. I
suspect we’ll see Google Catalogs get
retired as well — the last Ikea catalog over there
seem
to be from 2002. I’d say retiring experiments and services that haven’t caught
on is less embarrassing than leaving them out there doing badly, so Google
making the right choice.

Postscript: Gary Price reminds me that Marissa Mayer of Google said not too long ago that 60 to 80 percent of Google products may “crash and burn,” so at least Google can say they already said this might happen 🙂

Resources

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index
whitepaper | Analytics

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

8m
Data Analytics in Marketing
whitepaper | Analytics

Data Analytics in Marketing

10m
The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook
whitepaper | Digital Marketing

The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

1y
Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study
whitepaper | Digital Marketing

Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

1y