18 years ago, Google shut down Google Answers, a service that allowed anyone to ask a question to freelancers, known as Google Answers Researchers (GAR), for a fee. Launched in April 2002, it competed against the free-to-use Yahoo! Answers. The answers fed directly into Google’s own index (they’d appear in Google Search results page) and offered an interesting alternative to the existing knowledge base back then.
Fast forward to 2024 and Reddit, a website that offers something similar to Google Answers (albeit in an expanded form), just announced its IPO as well as a deal to pocket $60 million in annual fees from Google to allow the latter from training its AI on existing Reddit content, content that is curated and maintained by an army of more than 60,000 volunteers, the Redditors.
