Good news day for Yahoo

Here is a little snippet of news that almost slipped under our radar during the ABTA Convention.

Google quietly axed its Answers service on Tuesday, claiming the goals for a “company fuelled by innovation” often change for some products.

Fair enough.

Nevertheless, the real reason could be that the goal, since they launched the product four years ago, has actually become too big as arch rival Yahoo!’s own Answers product has been widely praised and is incredibly popular. Some even dare suggest Answers could be Yahoo!’s saving grace

“Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users,” says a message on the Google Blog. “We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.”

The service has now been retired, the site says. See the above image and our own cheeky question

John Battelle’s SearchBlog notes how the Yahoo! press office in the US was clearly having a lot of fun with the announcement and could hardly contain its delight, peddling out the latest stats about the success of Yahoo! Answers.

They’ve probably been waiting for a day like Tuesday for a long time…

Kevin May, editor, Travolution