Google Answers to Relaunch as Google Q&A

In a day and age where services like Mahalo and Wikipedia are succeeding because of the human component of question answering (and some or all of those human components are receiving some sort of compensation), for Google to flout that makes for somewhat of a head-scratcher. Mashable

Google Answers to Relaunch as Google Q&A

Google intends to relaunch the question-answering service Google Answers, which was closed last year. In Google Answers, "users could post a question (...) and specify how much they were willing to pay for an answer. A researcher then searched for the information they wanted and posted it to Google Answers." Some of the former Google Answers researchers built a similar service at Uclue.com.

Google Q&A, code-named Confucius, no longer has paid experts and works in a similar way with Yahoo Answers. Google Q&A was launched in Russia in June and in China, two months later.

Here's a message from Google's translation console:

"Q&A - This message is a name of successor for Google Answers. We will use it in OneGoogle toolbar, which you see on top of google.com page in the more.. section. Also, please use full name to translate it. That is, Questions and Answers. Abbreviation should be used only for English. URL showing this message: toolbar on top of http://www.google.com."


It's interesting to note that Google Q&A is also the name of a feature that displays answers to simple questions at the top of Google's search results page. Maybe Google will combine the facts automatically extracted from web pages with the explicit answers from the new service.