Around this time last year Google officially killed off Google Answers, the company's service where curious users could post questions and specify how much they were willing to pay to have them answered by experts. As it turn out the answer was almost nothing. Most people seemed to prefer Yahoo's somewhat simpler model and traffic to Google Answers never matched expectations.
However, it would seem that Google hasn't completely abandoned the idea behind an Answers service. In fact, it has already resurrected the service in China and Russia and some new information on the Google Translate page points to a re-birthed Answers coming soon to other Google sites.
The Google translation interface, which is a way for interested outsiders to help Google provide support for their native languages, refers to a new service, Google Q & A, the “name of successor for Google Answers.”
This time around Google Questions and Answers will not feature paid experts and sounds, from what details are available, like a clone of Yahoo Answers.
Google Operating System, which discovered the new Google Q & A also notes that “Questions and Answers, is “the name of a feature that displays answers to simple questions at the top of Google's search results page.” GOS speculates that perhaps “Google will combine the facts automatically extracted from web pages with the explicit answers from the new service.”
That might make for an interesting service and indeed Google needs to offer something better than a Yahoo clone since Yahoo already dominates that niche and Google has publicly pulled out of it once, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence for a second round.
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