
How Yahoo (or Facebook) Could Really Kill Google - transburgh
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-yahoo-or-facebook-could-really-kill-google
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aston
Knowledge search is cool and all, and Naver shows how powerful a force it can
be when the entire nation's using it, but so far it's not fulfilled its
promise of being _the_ way to search.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft developed QA products (Y! Answers and Live QnA,
respectively) hoping to have a semblance of Naver's success, meanwhile piping
the answers into the mainstream search, enhancing their Google competitors. So
far, though, beyond being somewhat popular, they're sort of glorified forums.
The people answering questions aren't supplying good enough answers to be
worthwhile most of the time. And the fact that the sites encourage high volume
over high quality doesn't help matters either.

Even worse (for a would-be Google killer), Google's still the king of indexing
content, so if you open up your question-answer pages, which you almost
certainly would, Google's going to be serving it up for you and getting ad
revenue for it. I think this is not the right vector for killing Google at
all.

~~~
yters
And it sucks that Google Answers was closed because of those other services.

~~~
aston
Google Answers wasn't knowledge search, it was a paid answers service. The
focus there was lower volume, higher quality regulated by a financial
marketplace rather than community features. Not really even in the same class
of product.

It was shut down not because of competition but instead because it wasn't
worth anything to Google, really, at least relative to their search product.

~~~
yters
Ah, ok. I remember reading that it couldn't compete with the lame Yahoo!
equivalent for some reason.

------
ivan
How (wormy) apples really kill pears :)

