Google Answers Bids Adieu

If Google Answers has gone, can Yahoo and other be far behind?

Market Research Service Focus?
Compared to the Q&A services reviewed so far on this blog (myLot and Yahoo Answers) Google Answers was really the serious kind. Could see a lot of market research kind of questions being asked on the site, and some being answered.

Here is a sampling that got answered, for $200 apiece:
"List of Professional Wine Storage Faciliites in the US for Private Collectors"
"Radio and TV stations reaching out to "hyper-connected kids" - this one needed case studies.

And here are some that did not get any formal response (again $200 apiece):
"Formula and techniques for Electro-Polishing liquid of Chrome Cobalt alloys"
"Costa Rica online gambling" - need names of the 2000 odd online gambling companies, annual revenues, employees, public traded, etc...

Not Enough Participation
Over the last four and half years, Google got the following number of posts
Category (no of posts)
Arts and entertainment (2749)
Business and money (8639)
Computer (4372)
Family and home (1172)
Health (2399)
Reference, education and news (3120)
Relationships and society (851)
Science (1624)
Sports and recreation (1096)
Miscellaneous (944)

So over four and half years they got about 27,000 posts, or less than two posts each day, for each of the catogories.

And a quick math on the turnover on the site:
The revenue figures on four random pages on the site were $185. 95, 225 and 81, which works out to be $146.5 for 25 questions. Which works out to $158k for 27k posts through the life of this site. Not much really (and Google gets only 25% of the turnover)! I dont think it is significant even if you add the adsense revenue, which must have picked up in the last couple of years.

Observations on this Model
- People are quite generous with tips! $100 on a $200 job!
- But to be fair, some of the $200 questions need a lot of work, and might have cost more in the 'outside' (or should I say 'inside') world.
- The answers are public! Private market research is not.
- Lot of info is based on online search itself. Some do pick up the phone and confirm, before posting answers. On monetizing online search, I guess this is how Google might have started this service - move to move up higher the service value chain, but could not gather enough momentum.
- Some even showcase their search practice (Googlers popularizing Google's search capabilities?)

What could have been different?
Ratings are good, but what if you dont like the answer? Can you withhold payment? Reducue payment? If a person who has a previous consistent lower payment, could that be a factor in the actual payment made? E.g., the payment amount could be value*avg rating.