In 4 yrs, Google runs out of Answers

San Francisco: Google has finally run out answers.

Four years after the high-pitched launch of its fee-based Answers service, Google has announced its closure, apparently due to its failure to catch on with the web users.

"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 project," a Google official wrote on the company blogsite.

Google Answers was based on an idea by the company's co-founder Larry Page and enlisted researchers to find answers to submitted questions at rates ranging from $2 to hundreds of dollars.

It seems Yahoo's free Answers service took away all the traffic from Google, forcing it to admit a rare defeat. On Wednesday, Google went public with its decision, saying that it would stop accepting questions this week and post the last of the answers by the end of the year.

An archive of Google Answers questions and responses will, however, remain available at the Mountain View, California-company's website, company officials said.

Incidentally, the decision comes only months after Microsoft launched a similar no-charge service

called Windows Live QnA. The Answers services on the web tap into the online community for responses to queries.

"Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users," software engineers Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher blogged on the company website.

"Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner."

Even as the news broke, the blogsphere went wild with speculation that the shutdown was proof that the company has suffered a chink in its armour. Others, however, said Google dropped the programme as Google Answers wasn't contributing to its mission of 'organising the world's knowledge and making it useful'.

Experts also point out that Google Answers had become simply redundant on the face of its hyper-efficient search engine and its sophisticated algorithms, which are now so good that most people no longer need to pay others to answer questions for them. They can do it themselves quickly, and for free.