Google is shutting down its user-pays question-answer service Google Answers, where for as little as $2.50 a pop hand-picked researchers answer questions. Google will stop accepting new questions later this week, and will stop supplying answers to questions by the end of the year.

The problem with Google Answers has always been pretty obvious; Yahoo’s rival service Yahoo Answers allows you to your get your questions answered for free. Sure, Google Answers might have been able to claim that it offered better answers, but at the end of the day, free is very attractive, and with Yahoo Answers having successfully built a community around its question answering service, a lot of the time the answers are actually quite good.

The announcement of the closure was made by two Google software engineers, Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, through Google’s official blog:

“Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product.

Google Answers was launched in 2002. According to Fikes and Baugher, the project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small four-person team turned it into reality in less than four months:

“For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people’s minds.

“Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn’t drink water emitted by your air conditioner. Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our building might be on fire.

“The people who participated in Google Answers — more than 800 of them over the years — are a passionate group committed to helping people find the information they need, and we applaud them for sharing their incredible knowledge with everyone who wrote in.”

While Google Answers will not be accepting any new questions, the existing questions and answers will remain available.

Fikes and Baugher finish their post with a classic example of corporate speak, where the closure is actually positioned as a good thing:

“Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We’ll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.”

The closure of Google Answers shows just how difficult it is to get the user pays concept to work online. No doubt this was a chance for Google to experiment with different business models. My tip for Google: don’t start charging for Google search.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 11:01 am under Technology, Web2.0.

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