Last night Google announced that they are shutting down their Answers service. They don’t explain why in their post, but I think that the Hitwise graph below says it all.
Yahoo! Answers, which relies on the community to answer user’s questions for free, has taken off. Google Answers, which relies on vetted researchers to answer user’s questions for money, has been stagnant and recently drooping in market-share. Microsoft’s QnA Live has a similar model to Yahoo!, but ceded the first-mover advantage and has not caught on as quickly. I think Google realized that their model was not scaleable and that it was going to be a distractor for their engineers in the future — better to kill it now and make room for another, better service.
What all of these companies are looking at is the success of Korea’s Naver. Naver was an also-ran search engine in Korea that rose to the top after the launch of their Knowledge Search (a service which relies on the community to answer user’s questions for free). Yahoo! Answers seems to have the community magic needed to make this work in the US and, like Naver, integrates the community knowledge throughout their site.
An interesting player in this space is Amazon. They have stealthily introduced two seemingly separate players in this space, Askville and NowNow (Radar post). Both aim to answer users’ questions. Askville relies on the community and is free. NowNow uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a back-end for a small fee. One of the problems with relying on community is that some questions go unanswered; NowNow is the only system truly set-up to at least address every question.
Danny Sullivan has a great perspective on this event.