At least in one arena, Yahoo is way ahead of Google, and hopefully this will force Google to do a rational rethink of its services portfolio: Google is shutting down its Google Answers service. The company has announced that new questions won’t be accepted after the New Year, though the site will continue to let people view the question archives. But as Danny writes, “killing off Google Answers might ultimately be a way for Google to relaunch with something fresh and radically different. We’ll see. Killing it off remains far better than leaving things like Google Voice Search still up with a note to ‘check back in a little while,’ when it hasn’t run for years.”
Yahoo Answers was launch early this year, and has caught on in a big way, much to the surprise of everyone…Yahoo has now rolled out country specific version in UK and other places.
Updated: FT’s Tech blog lists some of the other possible Google services that might be shut down..speculation on their part. It includes Google Video: “Sorry, guys, but we just don’t buy the idea that you’re going to continue to pump money into Google Video now that you’ve snapped up YouTube. If we had to bet on one project to be next to go on the block, this would be the one.” Makes sense.