Uclue

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

~ the eulogy ~

I knew what Google Answers was and never once considered using it. Paying dollars for a question in 2007 from Turkey meant a card payment to an American service for something the forums would eventually give you for nothing, and eventually was usually fast enough. Uclue is the sequel to a product I had already decided was not for me, so this whole grave is written from the outside.

Google closed Answers to new questions on 30 november 2006. The odd thing about that shutdown is who it hit. Google was retiring a small experiment, but on the other end of it were several hundred people with a login and an actual income. They called themselves Researchers, capital R, and some of them had been doing it for four years.

Roger Browne, who answered as eiffel-ga, was a programmer and one of those researchers. He did not write a farewell post. He put Uclue into beta on 28 february 2007 and announced it publicly on 7 march, three months and a week after the service that employed him had closed its doors.

~ the dossier ~

~ the guild ~

The mechanics were carried over almost unchanged, which was the point. You wrote a question and attached a price somewhere between ten and four hundred dollars, picked according to how hard you thought it would be. A researcher who thought the price was fair locked the question and went away to work on it. What came back was prose with sources, written by a named person, not a list of links.

The split was the part Google never had to think about and Browne did. Researchers kept 75 percent of the fee and every cent of any tip, with the remaining quarter covering the running of the site. By may 2007 that arrangement had pulled in 37 of the old Google Answers researchers, scattered from North America out to the Philippines. It was less a startup than a cooperative that had walked out of a closed factory with its own tools.

~ what a question was worth ~

The service worked best on the questions search is worst at. Not "what year did this happen", which any engine will answer, but the ones that need somebody to read four hundred pages of a trade publication and tell you what the pattern is. Small businesses used it for market sizing. Writers used it for the fact that would have taken a week of library time.

That is a genuinely valuable thing and it was never going to be a large one. The market for a forty dollar research question is small, and it shrinks every time the free web gets slightly better at faking the same output. Ten years in, the same question could be dropped into a search box or a forum and something plausible would come back for nothing. Whether it was correct is a separate matter, and the whole difficulty of selling research is that most people cannot tell the difference until it costs them.

~ what it left ~

Uclue closed on 15 december 2017 after almost eleven years, quietly, in the manner of a business that had been small and solvent rather than large and doomed. The domain stopped answering some time after and the archive went with it.

What it proved, and then unproved, is that a paid answer has a name attached to it. If the research was wrong you knew exactly who wrote it, and that person's rating suffered. Everything that replaced this model removed the name. The answer arrives from a crowd or from a model, with no reputation on the line and nobody to ask a follow-up question. Uclue's researchers were the last people in this business who could be held responsible for a sentence.

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