Friday, June 29, 2007
Knowledge Search: Google Answers for Russia
By Tony Ruscoe
For anyone like myself who can’t speak Russian, you can use Google Translate to get a reasonably good gisted machine translation of the post. Here’s a summary:
- You can ask questions and get answers from other users.
- You can earn points for answering questions and become an “expert” in subjects; better answers gain more points.
- You should label questions to make them easier to find. (What happened to Google’s world-class indexing algorithms?)
- Russia is the first country where this is being launched (which I guess means it may be rolled out to others in the long-term).
- You will be able to chat with “smart people”...
Nowhere does the announcement mention paying for answers, which was the basis for the old Google Answers site. Instead, it’s free to ask questions, like at Yahoo! Answers. However, when asking a question, you must specify how many points you wish to spend on asking the question – and you must have these points available. Presumably, these points then get awarded to the best answer. (I got 100 points just for signing up and could gain more by answering questions.)
Google may have been working on this service for some time. The “cf” service code was available as a “New Service” in the Google Accounts sandbox I discovered last year. Also, although the entire interface is currently only available in Russian, we know from the login page that the English name for this service is apparently “Knowledge Search”.
So, why has Google decided to release this in Russia rather than the United States? Do you think an English version of this site could be more popular than Yahoo! Answers?
[Via Googling Google. Screenshot by Google.]
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