Google Baraza

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

~ the obit ~

On 25 October 2010 Google posted a note on its Africa blog introducing Baraza beta. Baraza is Swahili for a council or a gathering where things get decided, and the problem it was built against was stated openly: there was very little African content on the web, so a search engine covering the continent kept returning answers written somewhere else about somewhere else. Baraza's fix was to ask people on the continent to write the missing pages themselves, one question at a time.

Mechanically it was a Q&A site of the period. You made a profile and followed other users, and the answers that got rated well were fed back into Google's own search results so the work did not stay trapped on a side property. It ran in English and French, which covered a lot of Africa's internet in 2010 and not all of it.

The lineage behind it is the interesting part. Google Answers, the paid version where you put money on a question and a vetted researcher took it, had closed in 2006 and left Google without an answer to a category it kept watching other people win. Baraza was the second attempt, with the researchers replaced by the crowd and the money replaced by points. By late 2010 the comparison everybody reached for was Quora, which had launched the same year to a very different audience.

Google announced on 23 June 2014 that Baraza would stop accepting questions and answers. The site went read only and the content stayed up as a public archive, which sounded like preservation until the deletion date came with it: the archive was scheduled to be removed on 30 April 2015 and disappeared at some point in May.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the points economy ~

The thing worth remembering about Baraza is that the whole site ran on a currency. Points came from answering and went out from asking, so a user who only ever wanted things ran out of ability to want them, and a user who answered built a balance. It is an old newsgroup instinct rendered as a ledger, and it is a much more honest design than the infinite-free-questions model that every later Q&A site used before discovering it needed moderators.

I have no memory of this site and no business pretending otherwise. In 2010 I was in Turkey on a TTNet line, and a Q&A service that answered in English and French for users in Nairobi and Lagos was never going to pass through my browser. It gets a page here anyway, because Google ran it for three years and eight months and then took the archive down too.

~ what Archive Team got ~

The useful footnote is the rescue. Archive Team started a Warrior project on 25 April 2015, five days before Google's stated deletion date, and pulled the English and French editions plus Google's Russian answers site at otvety.google.ru in a few days of distributed crawling. The result sits on archive.org as the googlebaraza collection. Google's public archive lasted eleven months. The copy made by volunteers in a weekend is the one that is still readable.

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