Who’s Got All the Answers?

I was in a very interesting product-related meeting all day yesterday. If I said anymore people would show up at my door and make me shorter than I already am. But during that meeting I got a series of emails about the fact that Google was closing its paid “Google Answers” offering. (Here’s Google’s official post.)

Google Answers was not an entirely original idea at the time — perhaps the execution was novel — but its user-pays model made some sense. What has happened in the interim is that Google’s own success and general improvements in search, the emergence of Wikipedia and the success of free versions “Answers,” which are now widespread (Yahoo! Answers, Microsoft QnA, the forthcoming Askville and social media more generally), doomed the service.

Meanwhile here’s what I got from . . .

Yahoo! PR:

Worldwide numbers for Yahoo! Answers and Knowledge Search (18 countries and 8 languages): Yahoo! Answers has 60 million unique users worldwide and 160 million answers.

US/English-speaking countries numbers for Yahoo! Answers: Yahoo! Answers has 14.4 million unique users (comScore October) and 60 million answers.

And ChaCha PR:

ChaCha founder Scott Jones says he’s not surprised Google Answers failed – not everyone answering the questions was knowledgeable, it wasn’t fast enough AND the system cost too much.

Unlike Google Answers, ChaCha’s service is FREE, is conducted in real-time (through an instant-message chat interface) and questions are answered by people with specific knowledge about your topic (AND they care about providing a good answer because their rating and pay is based on a good experience!)

What’s curious to me is that Google didn’t seek to reinvent the service or make it free to tap into the community/free answers trend.