Hi fredg2004,
Thanks for the question and what is likely my last answer here at GA.
A sad day indeed for me and my colleagues.
I think you will find slightly differing opinions depending on who you
ask and how the media misinterprets this event. I tell you first what
it was not which was Yahoo Answers "winning" the research service
race. These are two entirely different services, as I am sure you know
as you seem to have had enough experience with GA to have seen the
value of a paid researcher community. This was an amazing place likely
never to be duplicated again in cyberspace.
Truth? GA simply did not make enough money for the boss in my humble
opinion. Plain and simple. Now one might ask why, and as you'll note,
I have a definite perspective on this one. GA was promoted only once
and for a brief period of time on the home page of Google. We had more
questions than we could read, much less answer and had the joy of
being able to pick and choose and stay as busy as we cared to. But the
boss claimed the servers were being overloaded and moved us off to the
"more" section, then further back and harder to find and eventually
off the Google Services pages entirely. Seems to me if the servers
were overloaded, that's a good thing. G_d knows more servers could
have been added.
GA was further crippled a few months ago when notification of answers
and clarifications stopped working. No one ever took the time to fix
it, nor post that a problem existed and direct our valued clients to
check back often to see if there had been action on their question.
Perhaps AdSense had everyone so busy they simply lost interest in
Answers. I can't say for sure. We are contractors, or were. And not
Google employees. We have no more inside information than you.
I can tell you that the GA researcher community will continue to band
together behind the scenes. There is a petition circulating to save
GA, but I frankly don't think that will have success though I would be
overjoyed to be proven wrong. We have a lot of clever people thinking
feverishly on ways to bring the best of what we had here into its next
incarnation.
Do sign and pass on the petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/ganswers
And bookmark this site for keeping in touch with us and what we are up to:
http://web-owls.com/
And thank you, and thank all of the great folks that have stopped by
here over the last 4 1/2 years for supporting us in one of the best
and most life changing adventures I have been on. Its been an E ticket
ride, for sure.
I welcome other researchers to add, correct or voice other opinions in
comments. And I more than welcome the GA editors to comment and show
me where I am wrong. But that likely will not happen.
There's a little over 1,000 questions left to be answered. Some have
no answer. Some will be answered over the next month as the engines
wind down and we exit through the jetway.
I hope this tells you what you wanted to know and hope that comments
continue to fill in the missing details.
Have the best of holidays.
-=clouseau=- |
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