After shriving on the vine for few years, Google decided to put Google Answers out to pasture. [metaphor alert] If you've never heard of it, Google Answers allowed people who wanted research done to post a question on-line and offer a bounty for the answer.
When it started 4 years ago, I thought it was a great way to make a few bucks while learning new things. Unfortunately it never really took off. As an early user, I think it was the too convoluted for most people.
It doesn't matter now; they are going to stop accepting questions this week and stop taking answers at the end of the year.
In a long string of impressive successes for google, this is one of their few failures. I think the idea still has merit, I always thought it was a victim of google being spread too thin. Yahoo answers (which is free) is still going strong but I don't find the answers as good.
