Google Plans to Cancel Paid Service for Answers

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 29 — Google said Wednesday that it would shut down Google Answers, a service that allows users to pose a question to a panel of researchers and pay for a helpful answer.

The service, which began about four years ago, failed to gain much traction with users, especially when compared with a rival service offered by Yahoo, which is free.

“It was not one of our most popular products,” said Sunny Gettinger, a Google spokeswoman.

Google, which has had overwhelming success in the Web search business, has introduced dozens of other services, many of which have not turned into hits. The company has said that experimentation is an important part of its strategy and that a high failure rate for new products is to be expected.

Google Answers never generated much traffic or revenue for Google, said Danny Sullivan, editor of the online publication Search Engine Watch. Its demise represents a missed opportunity to be competitive in this area, Mr. Sullivan said.

“Yahoo has an answers product that works,” he said. Because Google Answers required users to pay, he said, it “could not have been that product.” Mr. Sullivan noted that unlike Yahoo, Google had not done much promotion for its service.

Yahoo Answers, which was introduced nearly a year ago, has quickly built up a large community of users. Yahoo said the number of answers in its database grew from 10 million in May to about 60 million now. The site (answers.yahoo.com) had about 14 million users in October.

“It has been one of our most successful launches,” said Tomi Poutanen, product director for Yahoo Social Search. Yahoo has had trouble keeping up with competitors like Google and MySpace in other areas.

At Yahoo Answers, anyone can ask or answer a question. The person who asks a question selects the best answer, and other members of the community can rate that answer. Mr. Poutanen described it as a way to harness the “wisdom of the crowds.”

“The real appeal of the service is in the diversity of answers you get to your question,” he said.

The archive of questions on Google Answers shows that users paid as much as $150 in recent days for information on hedge funds. Those asking questions on the site state how much they are willing to pay for a satisfactory answer from the researchers, who are independent contractors screened by Google employees.

The company said more than 800 panelists had answered questions on the service, and that the Google Answers archive would remain available when the service stops accepting new questions later this week.