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(sur Techcrunch, ici et ici aussi)

Yahoo Answers a déjà un an, et c'est un énorme succès !

In one year, Yahoo Answers has had 60 million users and 160 million answers.

Along with the party, Yahoo is publishing data from a Harris Interactive survey, showing how people are using online Q&A sites like Answers. The survey shows that one in three online adults have used a Q&A site, and of these, half say that information from a Q&A site has influenced a decision they have made.

According to the Harris survey, 55 percent of adults would prefer to have their questions answered from a group of individuals rather than an individual response from a friend or family member. And of course, users indicated that that they’d prefer the answers forum to be free with 81 percent saying that they would look to the Internet for answers if the service was free and 77 percent saying that they would look to the Internet if they knew they would receive instantaneous responses.

Au même moment, Google annonce la fermeture de leur service de questions/réponses... avec la justification suivante :

“Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product,” wrote Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, software engineers for Google, on their blog. “Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people’s minds.”

On notera la rapidité de Google à lancer et tester un service, ainsi que leur rapidité à le tuer s'il n'est pas prometteur. Peut-être que le succès de Yahoo les a découragés ? Qu'en pensez-vous ?