Google Questions and Answers

Google Questions and Answers is a free knowledge market offered by Google that allows users to collaboratively find answers to their questions (also referred as Google Knowledge Search). It was launched in June 28, 2007 and replaces the fee-based Google Answers service, discontinued on December 1, 2006. Google had chosen Russia as the first country to launch this new service.

Technologically, Google service most closely resembles analogous services by Naver and Yahoo!. It is pseudonymous: the nicknames of the authors of questions and answers are shown right next to their contributed content. Google uses question tagging to help users find relevant questions.

As most services of this kind, Google provides an incentive system to motivate people to answer questions. It is based on assigning points for actions and a system of levels loosely based on the Russian system of academic degrees. An interesting feature of the incentive system is that Google's reward for visiting is higher than for posting an answer.

On August 20, 2007, Google and Tianya, a Chinese community website, launched a free Q&A service entitled "Tianya Answers".

External links

* [http://otvety.google.ru/otvety/ Google Questions and Answers (Russian site)]
* [http://wenda.tianya.cn/wenda/ Google Questions and Answers (Chinese Tianya site)]
* [http://googlerussiablog.blogspot.com/2007/06/google.html Announcement about the new service in Google Russia blog (in Russian)]
* [http://3form.org/blog?p=34 Google Answers is reborn in Russia, a blog post providing more details about the service in English]
* [http://googlified.com/2007google-otvety/ Google Otvety from Googlified]