Google Inc., operator of the most- used Internet search engine, is ending a service that lets users pose questions on its Web site and get answers for a fee.
Google Answers, conceived by co-founder Larry Page, will stop accepting new questions later this week, Mountain View, California-based Google said today on its Web log.
The service, described by Google as an experiment developed by a team of four, lets users post questions online and specify a price they’re willing to pay for an answer from researchers. Yahoo! Inc. in December began a competing service that lets people pose questions and get responses from other Yahoo users for free.
“Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users,” Google said on the blog. The company said that more than 800 researchers participated in the service over the years.
Shares of Google fell $2.58 to $486.92 at 1:02 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. They had risen 18 percent this year before today.
