Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, a Russian mystic born in the 1800s, supposedly survived being poisoned, shot, and beaten (though a subsequent drowning did him in). Now Google Answers is also proving hard to kill, and it has resurfaced in the same part of the world.
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.
Even though few of Google's services beyond search have caught on with the public like its omnipresent search engine, the company rarely kills off those projects; that made the announcement that Google Answers would be shutdown mildly surprising.