Google Question Hub

» see questionhub.withgoogle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Question Hub ran the publishing relationship backwards. Normally a publisher guesses what an audience wants and Google ranks the guess. Here Google collected the search queries it had failed to answer well, grouped them by subject, and handed the list to anyone who had verified a site in Search Console. You picked a question, wrote the article, submitted the URL back into Question Hub, and got performance figures on how the answer did.

The reason it existed was stated plainly by Ben Gomes, then running Search and Assistant, who said that more people were searching for answers to things than there was online content to answer them with, which produced bad results or no results. So the launch markets were chosen for where the index was thinnest rather than for where the money was. The beta opened in October 2018 for Indian publishers in Hindi and English. The wider announcement came on 8 August 2019, adding Indonesia in Bahasa Indonesia and Nigeria in English.

Turkey was never on the list, and neither was anywhere else in Europe, which is the honest reason I have no history with this. It was also a tool for publishers rather than for people, gated behind a verified web property, so an engineer with no site to feed had no door into it. I am writing about it as a thing I read the shutdown notice for.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the holes in the index ~

The interesting part is the admission. Google's whole commercial proposition is that the answer is already out there and the hard problem is ordering it. Question Hub was a product built on the opposite claim, that in some languages and some countries the page you need has not been written yet, and it published that gap as a work queue. It even kept score, showing publishers how their answers performed against the questions they had taken on.

It was a separate thing from the Questions and Answers feature attached to business listings, and the two got confused constantly. Searchers did not need a Search Console account to feed questions in. They needed a Google account and a query that went nowhere, which most people have produced several of this week.

~ the decline ~

It never left beta, in four years and three months. United States publishers got access around 2021, two years before the end, by which point the original markets had been living with a permanently unfinished product for most of its life. Wikipedia's article still carries a template asking what exactly the digital media backlog it was meant to reduce was supposed to be, which is a fair question to have about a product that shut down.

The notice appeared inside the tool in December 2022 and the SEO community found it rather than being told. Glenn Gabe posted a screenshot on 15 December and read it as a sign the feature was being folded into Search Console. The text was three sentences of Google boilerplate: "As of January 5, 2023, the Question Hub beta will end. If you'd like to retain a copy of your data, you can do so via Google Takeout up until March 6, 2023. After that date, Question Hub user data will be deleted."

That notice is also the reason this grave is dated 5 January. Wikipedia's infobox says 15 January, and so does the body text of the Search Engine Roundtable report, but the same report's own headline says 5 January and the screenshot pasted into it says 5 January twice. A number typed into a sentence lost to the number printed in the product. questionhub.google.com now redirects to creators.google, which is where Google files the things it still wants publishers to use.

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