 | |
Type of site | Knowledge market Reference desk |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | |
| URL | answers.google.com |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Yes |
| Launched | April 18, 2002 |
| Current status | Online, and read only since December 2006 |
Google Answers was an online knowledge market offered by Google, active from April 2002 until December 2006.
Google Answers' predecessor was Google Questions and Answers, which was launched in June 2001. This service involved Google staffers answering questions by e-mail for a flat fee (US$3.00). It was fully functional for about 24 hours, after which it was shut down, possibly due to excessive demand and the tough competition that Yahoo! set in place. [1]
Google Answers was launched in April 2002. A month later, a search feature was added. [2]
Google Answers came out of beta in May 2003. It received more than 100 question postings per day when the service ended in December 2006. According to Danny Sullivan of Searchenginewatch, Google Answers was not solid enough to compete against Yahoo! Answers. [3]
In late November 2006, Google reported that it planned to permanently shut down the service (except for the Hong Kong and Arabic versions). No new questions were accepted after November 30, 2006, and no new answers were accepted after December 31, 2006. It was fully closed by late December 2006, although its archives remain available. [4]
Google opened related sites, one in Russia also called Google Questions and Answers in 2007, and one in China called Tianya Answers, in reference to its Chinese partner site. In September 2009, Google launched an Arabic version called Google Egabat or Google Ejabat (إجابات Google), meaning Google Answers. [5] However, in late May 2014, this service was announced to be read-only starting from 23 June 2014. [6]
In an email sent to registered researchers announcing the closure, Google wrote:
We considered many factors in reaching this difficult decision, and ultimately decided that the Answers community's limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information. [7]
Google Answers was designed as an extension to the conventional search: rather than doing the search themselves, users would pay someone else to do the search. Anyone could ask questions, offer a price for an answer, and researchers, who were called Google Answers Researchers or GARs, answered them. Researchers were not Google employees, but contractors that were required to complete an application process to be approved to answer for the site. They were limited in number (according to Google, there were more than 500 Researchers; in practice, there were fewer active Researchers). The application process tested their research and communication abilities.
Researchers with low ratings could be fired, a policy which encouraged eloquence and accuracy. Also, Google stated that people who commented might be selected to become Researchers, therefore inspiring high-quality comments. For a Researcher, a question was answered by logging into a special researchers page and then "locking" a question they wanted to answer. This act of "locking" claimed the question for that researcher. Questions worth less than $100 could be locked for up to four hours, and questions worth more than $100 could be locked up to eight hours at a time in order to be properly answered. A Researcher could only lock one question at a time.[ citation needed ]
Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher's reward and a 50-cent fee per question. In addition to the researcher's fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100.
In Google Search, when a user would put "why?" at the end of a search query, Google would show a link to Google Answers where the answer could be provided for a fee. [8]
The pages of Google Answers' website ranked extremely well in Google's search results, and so the commenting system was widely exploited by the SEO community. [9]
Google's policies prohibited answering questions that would obviously lead to or contain:
Some librarians have criticized Google Answers as a service selling services that are part of the tasks of public librarians (in the United States). The most vocal of these critics was former Google Answers Researcher Jessamyn West, [10] whose contract was terminated after she violated the site's terms of service by publishing an article about her experience as a Google Answers Researcher. [11] Other reference librarians claimed that the service was not detrimental to libraries, but simply operated in parallel to them. [12]
Other critics claimed that the service encourages plagiarism. The official Google Answers policy was to remove questions that appeared to be school assignments. However, some journalists expressed concerns that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between a "legitimate" question and a homework assignment, especially in regard to sciences and programming.
The reference desk or information desk of a library is a public service counter where professional librarians provide library users with direction to library materials, advice on library collections and services, and expertise on multiple kinds of information from multiple sources.
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of security vulnerability that can be found in some web applications. XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same-origin policy. During the second half of 2007, XSSed documented 11,253 site-specific cross-site vulnerabilities, compared to 2,134 "traditional" vulnerabilities documented by Symantec. XSS effects vary in range from petty nuisance to significant security risk, depending on the sensitivity of the data handled by the vulnerable site and the nature of any security mitigation implemented by the site's owner network.
Ask.com is a question answering–focused e-business founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California.
MetaFilter, known as MeFi to its members, is a general-interest community weblog, founded in 1999 and based in the United States, featuring links to content that users have discovered on the web. Since 2003, it has included the popular question-and-answer subsite Ask MetaFilter. The site has eight paid staff members as of December 2021, including the owner. MetaFilter has about 12,000 active members as of early 2011.
A9.com was a former subsidiary of Amazon that developed search engine and search advertising technology. A9 was based in Palo Alto, California, with teams in Seattle, Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Iași, Munich and Tokyo. A9 has development efforts in areas of product search, cloud search, visual search, augmented reality, advertising technology and community question answering.
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions, in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCLC member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database. The database includes other information sources in addition to member library collections. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services. WorldCat is used by librarians for cataloging and research and by the general public.
Answers.com, formerly known as WikiAnswers, is an Internet-based knowledge exchange. The Answers.com domain name was purchased by entrepreneurs Bill Gross and Henrik Jones at idealab in 1996. The domain name was acquired by NetShepard and subsequently sold to GuruNet and then AFCV Holdings. The website is now the primary product of the Answers Corporation. It has tens of millions of user-generated questions and answers, and provides a website where registered users can interact with one another.
Jessamyn Charity West is an American library technologist and writer known for her activism and work on the digital divide. She is the creator of librarian.net. She is the Vermont Chapter Councilor of the American Library Association, and was Director of Operations at the group blog MetaFilter from 2005 to 2014. West owns MetaFilter.
Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were organised into categories with multiple sub-categories under each to cover every topic users may ask questions on, such as beauty, business, finance, cars, electronics, entertainment, games, gardening, science, news, politics, parenting, pregnancy, and travel. The number of poorly formed questions and inaccurate answers made the site a target of ridicule.
Naver (Korean: 네이버) is a South Korean online platform operated by the Naver Corporation. It was launched in 1999 as the first web portal in South Korea to develop and use its own search engine. It was also the world's first operator to introduce the comprehensive search feature, which compiles search results from various categories and presents them on a single page. Naver has since added a multitude of new services ranging from basic features such as e-mail and news to the world's first online Q&A platform Knowledge iN.
ChaCha was an American human-guided search engine that provided free, real-time answers to any question, through its website, or by using one of the company's mobile apps.
A knowledge market is a mechanism for distributing knowledge resources. There are two views on knowledge and how knowledge markets can function. One view uses a legal construct of intellectual property to make knowledge a typical scarce resource, so the traditional commodity market mechanism can be applied directly to distribute it. An alternative model is based on treating knowledge as a public good and hence encouraging free sharing of knowledge. This is often referred to as attention economy. Currently there is no consensus among researchers on relative merits of these two approaches.
Askville was a user-driven research site founded by Amazon.com. It was opened to the public on December 8, 2006, and shut down on October 25, 2013.
Uclue was an online fee-based research service that operated between February 28, 2007 and December 15 2017.
Google Questions and Answers was a free knowledge market offered by Google that allowed users to collaboratively find good answers, through the web, to their questions. It was launched on June 28, 2007 and replaces the fee-based Google Answers service, discontinued on December 1, 2006. Google had chosen Russia as the first country to launch this new service.
WolframAlpha is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is offered as an online service that answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data.
Aardvark was a social search service that connected users live with friends or friends-of-friends who were able to answer their questions, also known as a knowledge market. Users submitted questions via the Aardvark website, email or instant messenger and Aardvark identified and facilitated a live chat or email conversation with one or more topic experts in the 'askers' extended social network. Aardvark was used for asking subjective questions for which human judgment or recommendation was desired. It was also used extensively for technical support questions. Users could also review question and answer history and other settings on the Aardvark website. Google acquired Aardvark for $50 million on February 11, 2010. In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Aardvark.
Quora is a social question-and-answer website and online knowledge market headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users. As of 2020, the website was visited by 300 million users a month.
Google+ was a social network that was owned and operated by Google until it ceased operations in 2019. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google products like Google Drive, Blogger and YouTube. The service, Google's fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years, although usage statistics varied, depending on how the service was defined. Three Google executives oversaw the service, which underwent substantial changes that led to a redesign in November 2015.
Q&A software is online software that attempts to answer questions asked by users. Q&A software is frequently integrated by large and specialist corporations and tends to be implemented as a community that allows users in similar fields to discuss questions and provide answers to common and specialist questions.
