Websites like the old Google Answers?

Factual Questions
1

Hi All,

I imagine that many of us on this board are familiar with the old Google Answers website where a person would offer money in exchange for an answer to a question they had.

The questioner would state up-front how much they were willing to pay for a complete and satisfactory answer–anywhere from a few dollars to $50, $100 or even more.

I know a number of Dopers answered questions on Google Answers–PinkFreud, for example, was a well-known, popular and prolific researcher who answered many questions.

My question is this: Are there any websites that you know of that use a similar format to the old Google Answers?

Specifically, I’m looking for websites that have the following basic features:

  1. Questions asked (and any answers) are archived and open to the public;
  2. Anyone can answer a question–the site doesn’t require people who answer to be pre-approved “experts” in the field;
  3. The fees questioners are willing to pay are openly posted.
  4. Bonus question:

Can anyone think of a good reason why Google might have shut down Google Answers? I loved that site! It was always good to know that I could offer $20 or even $50 to get answers to my (typically) business-related questions, and usually within a day or two, or a week at most.

Thank you,

~Libre

2

I’m a big follower of tech news, so I can answer your bonus question fairly easily. In the past several months, google has been quietly shuttering services that aren’t sufficiently popular, or that replicate functionality provided by other google products (e.g. google reader was dropped because most browsers now include rss support built-in).

FOr a similar service, you could try amazon’s mechanical turk, though that’s more about crowdsourcing simple done-or-not projects. They don’t really have a mechanism for receiving many answers and awarding the prize only to the best answer.

3

What, you can’t get all the answers your :heart: could desire right here on the Straight Dope Message Board?

For FREE?

4

Well, there is uclue.com but it doesn’t allow anyone to answer. BTW, many google answer people went there when it closed.

J.

5

I’ve just discovered Rewarder.com - meets most of your criteria, although I don’t think the accepted answers are necessarily made public (at least, they haven’t been for the rewards I didn’t win)

6

Funny story, when I was first hired at my current employer, it was to work on a website like that. The company eventually decided they wanted to build something else, so it’s not around any more. Which means that this is a pretty useless post.

Sorry about that.

7

Wikipedia of course has a list for that. I don’t think any of them currently operating meet all of your criteria.