Google Answers: what happened, and why it shut down

Google Answers was a paid question-and-answer service launched on 18 April 2002 in which users posted a question with a price from $2 to $200 and one of about 500 vetted freelance researchers answered it, with Google keeping a quarter of the fee. It was one of Google's first products beyond search and its first with paying customers. Google announced its closure on 28 November 2006 and stopped accepting answers on 31 December 2006; the archive remains online.

Timeline [edit]

2002

18 April 2002 Launch

Google Answers opens in beta

$2 to $200 a question, 500 researchers.

2005

8 December 2005 Decline

Yahoo Answers launches

Free, crowd-sourced, and enormous within a year.

2006

28 November 2006 Shutdown announced

"Adieu to Google Answers"

No new questions after 30 November.

31 December 2006 Shutdown

Answers close

The archive stays online.

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google announced on 28 November 2006 that Answers would stop taking new questions on 30 November and new answers on 31 December 2006, and thanked its roughly 500 approved researchers; the archive of about 100,000 answered questions was left online. It gave no numbers, but the service was handling around a hundred questions a day when Yahoo Answers, free and a year old, was handling tens of thousands.

Our analysis: Google Answers was an interesting product that belonged to a different company: a small paid marketplace with human researchers, editorial standards and a fee split, in a company built on machines and scale. It worked well for the people who used it and could not grow, and when Yahoo showed that a free, ad-supported crowd would answer more questions worse for nothing, there was no argument left for keeping it.

History [edit]

Researchers for hire

Google Answers opened as a beta on 18 April 2002, when Google was still a private company with a small number of products. The idea was Larry Page's: let people who could not find something pay someone who could. A user posted a question and named a price, from $2 to $200 (plus a 50-cent listing fee), and one of Google's freelance researchers, screened by a test and identified by pseudonyms such as pinkfreud-ga and denco-ga, claimed it and posted a sourced answer, with follow-up allowed until the asker was satisfied; Google kept 25% and the researcher 75%. Anyone could add free comments. The questions ranged from homework and travel to legal, medical and business research, and some of the answers were remarkable pieces of work.

It was small and stayed small: about 500 active researchers over its life, and around 100 questions a day at the end. Google added little to it after 2003, and it was largely run by the researcher community, which had its own forum, culture and grievances about pay.

Yahoo answered

Yahoo Answers launched in December 2005 as a free service in which anyone could ask and anyone could answer, and within a year had tens of millions of users and more questions in a day than Google Answers had taken in four years. On 28 November 2006 Google said Answers would close, stopping new questions on 30 November and answers on 31 December 2006, and thanked its researchers. The archive of answered questions was left online, and several of the researchers set up Uclue, an independent successor that ran until 2010. Google returned to questions much later with the Q&A features inside Search and, briefly, Helpouts.

The domain today

answers.google.com still serves the read-only archive of questions and answers from 2002 to 2006.

Sources [edit]

Last verified: 16 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Google Answers