Google Questions and Answers is a free knowledge market offered by Google that allows users to collaboratively find answers to their questions (also referred as Google Knowledge Search). It was launched in June 28, 2007 and replaces the fee-based Google Answers service, discontinued on December 1, 2006. Google had chosen Russia as the first country to launch this new service.
Technologically, Google service most closely resembles analogous services by mail.ru, Naver and Yahoo!. It is pseudonymous: the nicknames of the authors of questions and answers are shown right next to their contributed content. Google uses question tagging to help users find relevant questions.
As most services of this kind, Google provides an incentive system to motivate people to answer questions. It is based on assigning points for actions and a system of levels loosely based on the Russian system of academic degrees. An interesting feature of the incentive system is that Google's reward for visiting is higher than for posting an answer.
On August 20, 2007, Google and Tianya Club, a Chinese community website, launched a free Q&A service entitled "Tianya Answers".
More languages were added, including English. The site is known as Google Baraza [1].
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Google Answers predecessor was also called Google Questions and Answers, which was launched in August 2001. The previous service had Google staffers e-mailing responses to questions for a flat $3 fee. It was up and functional for about a day. The demand may have overwhelmed their resources.[1][2]
Google bought a similar site for $50 million in 2010, but discontinued it in 2011. Google has earlier done the same thing with others services that they later have integrated within their own software. The site was called Aardvark.