I came across a news that Google has decided to abandon its answers services. According to Google’s official blog, it wrote, “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.

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.”

As I analyze why this action has been taken by Google, There are several clues that have prompted Google to shuts its answers services down.

1) The pay-per-answer model is failed. With Google oversell its search capabilities, people tend to search an answer on the Web through its search engine rather than paying them a fee from the range of US2 to as high as US200. On the other hand, Yahoo!’s Answers services doesn’t charge money. Instead, Yahoo! appeals to the vanity of smart people to ferret out the answers for them. Yahoo! has thus capitalize the concept of Web 2.0 and currently they have created a community members of over 65 million answers (up-to-date) all around the world.

2) Google Answers ranked low amongst all the available Google domains. According to the Hitwise Intelligence’s blog posting, Google Answers did not gained popularity amongst Google’s varied services, it has only 0.09% of market share and ranked as No. 14 as at 5/13/06. This considered as an unpopular Google subdomain to the public, as Hitwise Intelligence showed their analysis in the chart below:

Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/05/google_properties_understandin.html

3) It really is remarkable how badly Google Answers is doing against Yahoo! Answers. Frankly, I never would have thought that. As another Hitwise Intelligence’s blog posting, it wrote, “At present, Yahoo! Answers is over 50x the market share (in visits) of the new Live QnA and 24x of Google Anwers.” In this blog posting, they also provided a chart that represent the current market share gained by the aforesaid players.

Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/11/charting_answers.html

4) It seems the Google Answers did not successfully integrate with the Google’s search strategy, with the acquisition of Writely, JotSpot, and iRows, I expected they would likely to concentrate their synergy toward some other projects that may work well for them.

5) My sense is that Google is more “robotic, machine-like” company, but in contrast Yahoo! has created a sense that they look more “human”, no doubt the chances Yahoo! to be succeed in the fields of social search, or some other services such as answer services is much higher in the market.

I wish Yahoo! Answers good luck. Stay tuned.