Google Answers

» see answers.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

google answers ran from april 2002 to november 2006. those were my university years in ankara, with ttnet dial-up at home for the first half of the window and broadband landing toward the end. i never paid the two-dollar minimum to ask a question. honestly, the free web had enough for what an engineering student was doing in 2004.

the model was odd in hindsight. you posted a question with a price tag, anywhere between two dollars and two hundred. google took 25 percent of whatever you offered plus a 50-cent listing fee. roughly five hundred vetted researchers, called google answers researchers, watched the queue and picked questions they thought they could answer well. answers were public after posting, with free comments below.

by 2005 yahoo answers was already running a free open crowd-sourced version. it was lower-quality, often comically so, but it was free and you got an answer in twenty minutes. google saw the numbers and pulled the plug. the announcement landed on the google blog on 28 november 2006. no new questions were accepted from 30 november 2006, with the archived q&a left available indefinitely.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

it was a marketplace, not a forum. the researchers were paid contractors and they had reputations to manage. the long answers in the archive read like research notes, with citations and apologies for not finding more on a specific subtopic. there are people who still link to specific answers fifteen years later when they need a definitive 2004-era look at some obscure topic.

the q&a archive was the part that survived. google made a point of leaving the corpus online when it shut the service. you can still browse it. some of the answers are better than what current search returns for the same question, which is its own kind of small commentary on the way 2026 search works.

~ the funny part ~

google answers was a paid service that google ran for four years without ever scaling it. yahoo answers was a free service that yahoo ran for almost twelve years before shutting it. the lesson somebody clearly took home was that in 2006 you could not charge for a question. by 2026 you cannot charge for a question either. you have to charge a flat ai subscription that answers a billion of them.

the irony, if you want to call it that, is that the answers in the google answers archive are often the most useful 2004-era result for a question even now. paid researchers wrote them with citations and effort. they are still there. you just have to know to go look.

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