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Google has announced that Google Answers, the very first non-search project from Google, is closing down forever. Come the end of the year, Answers will stop accepting new questions, although the old pages will remain up as archives.

Why is Google shutting down Answers? Given their huge number of servers and the low usage of Answers, Google could have kept it up practically for free, so the only reason I can think of: Google is sending a message. Closing down Answers, a losing project that was started with an idea by founder Larry Page, Google is telling its employees that any of their projects can be killed, no matter what. It's a great call, and may have a positive impact on the projects Google engineers come up with.

What made Google Answers a failure? Yahoo Answers. Yahoo's product is about a year old, and has 50 times the market share of the four-year-old Google Answers. Hell, Microsoft's lesser-known Windows Live QnA, which went public only in September, was tracking to beat Google by early next year (and sooner now, obviously). Hitwise shows off the traffic stats.

Philipp wonders if Google is incapable of creating successful community sites. I'd say that, with the exception of Orkut (and even that is mostly in Brazil), Google just can't match Yahoo's success with creating communities. That's why Google had to buy YouTube, and we'll all be watching to see if they don't screw that one up. Hopefully Yahoo keeps playing to its strengths, and release more sites like Answers that take advantage of its large userbase and grow large communities.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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