Google Answers Shuts Down; Yahoo! Answers Up and Running

O'Reilly Radar > Google Answers Shuts Down; Yahoo! Answers Up and Running

Looking for answers? Aren't we all? Well, maybe not. Some interesting numbers on what is happening with the various answers services that are out there.

What is this all about? An extension of the newsgroups idea, answers.xx.com (where xx = insert name of major internet company), is that you post questions, especially those that you had trouble finding an answer for, and then a community would post answers for you. There are various business models for this and this short article mentions these.

Interestingly, people prefer a free answer to a good answer...and even then, there have been a few commentaries out there that support the notion that the experts' answers are not necessarily better answers.

In another post, I mentioned ChaCha. I reckon that this whole area has a lot of potential but also we have not yet seen the truly remarkable power that can be derived out of effective linking of large numbers of brains (soft and hard).