Human-based computation

Google recently announced that it closes its Google Answers service that was created in 2002-2003.

Google Answers is a second attempt of Google at Q&A service where live researchers answer questions on any topic for a fee. I am not sure if the Google Answers service had any novelty when it was launched, but it evolved over time. Initially it was very similar to the first paid online Q&A service Experts exchange launched in 1996. In this service, experts bid to answer questions and the winning expert provided the answer. Later Google Answers added elements from Free Knowledge Exchange service launched earlier by 3form.com (1998-1999). 3form service explores collective intelligence and collaboration among ordinary people to find solutions. There is no fee for posting a question and there is no experts: everyone can provide a possibly partial answer and improve answers provided by others, such that good answers can eventually evolve from partial ones.

In my opinion, late Google Answers was a very interesting experiment combining fee-based and free Q&A services together. To my knowledge it was the first attempt to combine them. However, paid researchers had to compete with free answerers in answering questions. This created unsatisfaction among researchers and they start to publicly criticize the service. I believe this criticism could be one of the reasons for the Google’s decision to close the service. The unsatisfaction of paid researchers in Google combined service might have something in common with what experts feel towards Wikipedia, where they have to compete on equal foot with non-experts.

So far Google attempts to explore social search technologies had only a limited success. In Korea, Google struggles to increase its market share, unable to compete effectively with Naver (NHN) exploring Knowledge-IN service (Korean equivalent of Free Knowledge Exchange). Yahoo adopted such service from Naver a year ago and successfully deployed it worldwide under the name Yahoo! Knowledge or Yahoo! Answers.

Despite the limited success so far, I believe Google has pretty good chances to improve its performance in this area. I expect that Google will continue its experiments with social search and eventually we will see a good replacement for Google Answers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 3:38 am and is filed under social search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.