Sunday, December 03, 2006
Google Plans to Cancel Paid Service for Answers
In the article “Google Plans to Cancel Paid Service for Answers” by Miguel Helft he talks about how Google is going to shut down its answers service. “A service that allows users to pose a question to a panel of researchers and pay for a helpful answer”. He states that they started this service about four years ago and when Yahoo decided to do this as well they didn’t charge a fee. It is also one of their best selling features of Google. While Yahoo advertised about the answers service they started to get a lot of business from people. “Yahoo Answers, which was introduced nearly a year ago, has quickly built up a large community of users. Yahoo said the number of answers in its database grew from 10 million in May to about 60 million now”. It is also one of their nest selling features now too especially since they have to compete against Google and Myspace. On the Google website they charge quite a bit of money for people to use their services. “The archive of questions on Google Answers shows that users paid as much as $150 in recent days for information on hedge funds, those asking questions on the site state how much they are willing to pay for a satisfactory answer from the researchers, who are independent contractors screened by Google employees”. If I were thinking about this answers service I would definitely go to Yahoo especially because it is free. Why pay a fee if another website is not charging. This was an interesting article about Google especially because I did not realize how these websites like to charge you for a service that they are providing online to you. Its pretty cool how one could charge while the other is giving their service for free.
Link: New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/technology/30google.html
Link: New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/technology/30google.html
