(3)
Google announced that Google Answers is closing up shop by years end. The old questions and answers will still be available, but they will not be accepting any new questions or answers after December 31st.
Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds.Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.
Danny has a nice write up on it over here.
A WebmasterWorld thread has some comments, including this one that I liked;
Bummer. I've been a Google Answers Researcher since 2002. It was fun for a while, but my life just got too busy to spend hours researching and writing the answer to a question for $1.50.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
