Google Blogoscoped pointed our attention to Google's Baraza, a Yahoo-Answers-like Q&A site for Africa. The expressed rationale behind Baraza is that it will help generate "local content" across the continent. There's a relatively elaborate point system (a "currency") used to pay for answers and as a reward for participation otherwise. Because it's globally available in English we're likely to see broad participation from outside of Africa in Baraza. The more interesting question in my mind is whether this will become a model for a larger Q&A effort at Google. The company cour [...]

Related Topics: Google: Acquisitions | Google: Q & A | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Engines: Word Of Mouth & Buzz Search Engines

Let's take "Google Me" seriously as a social networking site, successor to Orkut and overall Facebook challenger. As everyone by now knows Digg's Kevin Rose started a wave of coverage when he asserted over the weekend, in a Twitter post now removed, that Google was working on a Facebook competitor. Yesterday I asked Google for a comment and received a friendly but anonymous response: "We do not comment on rumor or speculation." Of course not. That almost certainly means that something is coming. I told several people yesterday that it was probably a beefed up version of Google Profil [...]

Related Topics: Facebook | Google: Accounts & Profiles | Google: General | Google: Mobile | Google: Orkut | Google: Q & A | Google: Web Search

Nathan Weinberg spotted Google Q&A spam yesterday for a search on how tall is paris. The results led to an adult site (I saw it myself yesterday), but have now been plugged. This is not the first time Google had issues with spam in the Google Q&A feature. First report was September 2006, which was fixed soon after also. [...]

Related Topics: Google: Q & A