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.
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.
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.