By now I’m 80% sure most of you are 100% tired of Google news today, but I keep reading about new happenings over at Google. This next bit of news is a little exciting for me. I was a big fan of the Google Answers service, asking questions and participating in answering questions. It seems that Google may be bringing back Google Answers in a little different form. Here’s the kicker. The new service which will probably be known as “Knowledge Search” (log in page says that) has launched in Russia, but has not been released in English yet.
To give you a taste of what this service is all about, here is a Russian to English 
translation of the blog post using the Google translation service. Here is a quick run down of what the blog post from Google’s Russian blog tells us about this new Google Questions and Answers service. First, this service is launching in beta, and knowing Google, I expect it probably never will leave beta status. Second, questions and answers are paid for using a points system instead of using real currency like past Google Answers. Third, the questions will be tagged with labels to enable quicker searches of the answers in the future. There is a top tags listing and a leading users board. If you want to see the site yourself, the translator actually does a pretty good job translating the actual site.
Opinion
If this ends up being a competitor to Askville and Yahoo Answers, I think this site could make a huge splash. As of now, Yahoo Answers dominates this sector, but there are some serious flaws with the Yahoo Answers site. If nothing else, this will create a bit more competition to drive innovation in this area.
