What is the root cause for shutting down Google Answers ?

Question

Is Google incapable of getting off true community sites in the way competitors/ ex-competitors like Yahoo, MySpace or YouTube do? Without disclosing the actual reasons behind the shut-down ??

Answer 1

Looks like their pool of users was too small for one thing. Also, in contrast to Yahoo Answers which is user-community driven and free, Google Answers employs a paid staff to do research and provide well-written responses (which are paid for by the asker).

I had no idea they were shutting down until I saw this. Good question.

Answer 2

Scalability.