A final answer for Google

Has Google finally made a mistake?

The Internet juggernaut announced Tuesday that it was closing its Answers site. The program, launched in 2002, allowed users to pay a fee to get researchers to answer questions. Several similar sites exist, both fee-based and free, from competitors including Microsoft, Yahoo and most recently, Amazon.

Google's blog posting didn't give a specific reason for the closure, saying only that the site was a "great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users." The company will stop accepting new questions later this week, but archives of older questions will be available for review.

Google is famous for letting its researchers experiment with side projects, many of which never make it out of beta. Bloggers wondered whether the move was a rare misstep by the search engine giant, or a sign that Google was trying to focus more energy on its core business, and stop futzing around with test projects.

Blog community response:

"Killing it off remains far better than leaving things like Google Voice Search still up with a note to 'check back in a little while,' when it hasn't run for years. I suspect we'll see Google Catalogs get retired as well -- the last Ikea catalog over there seem to be from 2002. I'd say retiring experiments and services that haven't caught on is less embarrassing than leaving them out there doing badly, so Google making the right choice."
--Search Engine Watch

"The problem seem to be that people don't want to pay some experts to get detailed answers, they just want simple answers from the man on the street. People don't have time to read books, newspapers with a lot of pages and long articles, but they're eager to watch reality shows. Listening people as clueless as you gives you a comforting feeling."
--Google Operating System

"Is Google incapable of getting off true community sites in the way competitors/ ex-competitors like Yahoo, MySpace or YouTube do? Without disclosing the actual reasons behind the shut-down, Google now calls Google Answers a 'great experiment' which started as a 'rough idea from Larry Page' - only that this experiment happened to involve actual people."
--Google Blogoscoped

"From Google's perspective, shutdown of Answers will save few of its smart engineers from maintaining an application that did not scale well in terms of revenues."
--Startup Squad