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Yahoo, Google Going Different Directions

Google Answers is shutting down forever. While Google and Yahoo may be competing in the web search domain, internally these companies have different visions of the future as suggested by some of the recent developments outlined here:

§ Blog Search Engine: Yahoo earlier integrated Blogs Search with Yahoo! News but for some reason, they quickly removed this feature without offering any reasons. On the other hand, Google is heavily promoting their own blog search search engine in the form of Google Blog Alerts and occasionally highlighting Blog Search results in the main organic search results page. Google also displays blog posts in their Finance portal.


§ Q & A Properties: Yahoo! is heavily betting on the success of Yahoo! Answers which some analyst believe could prove to be a turning point for Yahoo. They are also pushing search results from the Yahoo! Answers page to their main web search page. Google too has an equivalent paid service called Google Answers which is not so popular as the one from Yahoo. And today, the news is out that Google Answers is closing shop after a period of 4+ years.

The existing Qs and As will be available for reference but the site won't accept new Answers to questions by the end of the year.

As search engines keep getting better and better, people are probably not willing to pay for queries as they can find relevant information for free without much effort. Plus there are better places like Google Groups, Internet Forums and Yahoo Answers where your question is exposed to a diversified group of experts and replies are almost guaranteed.

Related: Google Web Search vs Google Blog Search [How are they different]

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