Google Launches “Question and Answers” In Russia

Jun 29, 2007 at 9:58am ET by Barry Schwartz

Googling Google reports Google Russia has launched a Questions & Answers service in Russia.

Although Google closed down Google Answers late last year, this launch of Questions & Answers is a new flavor of such an application. To me, it looks more like a Google Groups approach than anything else.

Since everything is in Russian, it is hard to understand what exactly is going on. Google Blogoscoped tries to translate the features:

- You can ask questions and get answers from other users.
- You can earn points for answering questions and become an “expert” in subjects; better answers gain more points.
- You should label questions to make them easier to find. (What happened to Google’s world-class indexing algorithms?)
- Russia is the first country where this is being launched (which I guess means it may be rolled out to others in the long-term).
- You will be able to chat with “smart people”…

So will we see Question & Answers in America and other countries? It is possible. See also related coverage via Techmeme.

Postscript From Danny: More than expect this to come. At Google Press Day 2007, Google’s Marissa Mayer suggested that Google understands that a more human model is what’s needed to succeed in some countries:

To date we rely largely on automation….I actually think the right answer is a blend of both, to get the incredible scale that automation and operate on and have the human intelligence, particularly in Asia

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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ONE COMMENT ON Google Launches “Question and Answers” In Russia

Boris Mordkovich, June 29th, 2007 at 4:26 pm ET:

In case you guys are interested, here’s the translation:

http://otvety.google.ru/otvety/help?file=Tour

Ask Questions

1) If you have a question that you can’t find an answer to, press the “Ask” button.

2) When you type in your question, we will try to match it up with any similar questions that may already be in the database.

3) Make sure to tag your question carefully so that others could find it easily.

4) Your question will be shown to those that are interested in this subject matter.

http://otvety.google.ru/otvety/help?file=Tour&id=2

1) While people are answering your question, you can take a look at the existing “tags” and select themes that may interest you.

2) Let us know if you can answer questions of any specific theme by tagging yourself to that theme? *Not sure how that functions*

3) When you click on a tag, it will only show you the questions that you may be interested in.

http://otvety.google.ru/otvety/help?file=Tour&id=3

1) If you found a question that you can fully answer, press the button “Answer”.

2) In the answer, you can include links to other pages that may be helpful to whoever asked the question.

3) Try to give answers that other users will rate as “5 Stars”!

===

Hope this gives you a rough idea of how that works. Sometimes it is actually pretty useful to know other languages. :)

Boris

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