Answers倒掉了，yahoo！的answers势头迅猛，baidu的知道是我经常用的，微软的live
Q&A虎视耽耽，知识问答平台方兴未艾。《数字图书馆论坛》06年第11期有一篇baidu公司田晓萌所写的《基于搜索引擎的知识问答平台研究》对搜索引擎此类产品有一个比较系统的介绍和分析。Google
Answers的退出，对Google也许是件好事，须知目前不管是蓝海还是长尾，细节决定一切，虽然世界是平的，但沟沟坎坎不看清也是会跌跟头的。
Adieu to Google Answers
Google is a company fueled by innovation, which
to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes
it means reconsidering our goals for a product. 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 taught us exactly how many
tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies
survive a good microwaving, and why you
really shouldn’t drink water emitted by your air conditioner.
Even closer to home, we learned one afternoon that our
building might be on fire.
The people who participated in Google Answers — more than 800 of
them over the years — are a passionate group committed to helping
people find the information they need, and we applaud them for
sharing their incredible knowledge with everyone who wrote
in.
If you have a chance, we encourage you to browse through the
questions posted over the last 4+ years. Although we won’t be
accepting any new questions, the existing Qs and As are available.
We’ll stop accepting new Answers to questions by the end of the
year.
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.