SEO Herald

Today on the official Google Blog, it was announced that Google Answers would no longer be accepting new questions. Around for about 4 years, the product was the brainchild of Larry Page, which quickly grew from a four person operation into an 800+ member team of contributors.

The idea behind Google Answers is that people would ask a question, and be willing to pay a certain amount of money to get a professional answer. The researchers would receive 3/4 of the profit, while the remaining 1/4 went to Google. Answers would cost a minimum of $2.50, with the cost increasing with the level of difficulty.

Answers was sort of the odd man out from the beginning, mainly because it was a pay service. Most everything else Google offers up is completely free. The cost of the service also may have ultimately been what deterred people from using the service. It was also never an integral part of Google Search, and was more of a side item than anything.

The old questions and answers will remain for an undisclosed amount of time, but Google will cease to accept new questions by the end of the week.

Google has stopped increasing Gmail storage, capping accounts out at 2.8GB. Bummer. I was hoping I'd see it surpass the 3 GB mark one day. At this time it is unclear whether the halting the increasing storage is a permanent move, or something that has to do with the latest Gmail glitch.

Google has been issued by two new patents by the U.S. Patent office. One of the patents was for a specialized similarity search engine, which would allow users to check for duplicate content. The second patent was for Google's Digital Mapping Systems patent, which describes 'various methods, systems and apparatus for implementing aspects of a digital mapping system'.

A Brazillian court has ordered YouTube to be shut down due to the company's failure to prevent a celebrity sex video from being posted over and over again. The celebrity, Daniela Cicarelli, and her boyfriend Tato Malzoni sued YouTube after being notified that a video of the two having sex on a beach was being repeatedly posted on YouTube.

Initially, the couple demanded that YouTube take the video down and pay them $116,000 for each day that the video remained up. The case has dragged on for several months. In December, they filed another suit asking that the site be shut down until the video is removed. On Wednesday, the court honored that request. However, due to the fact that YouTube is based out of the United States, such a ruling would prove difficult to enforce.

With Macworld coming up next week, the online world is abuzz with excitement and, of course, rumors. The latest Macworld rumor to surface is that Google and Apple will be annoucing a partnership at the expo that would involve Google supplying video search for Apple's mysterious iTV service that has yet to be launched. With Google CEO Eric Schmidt sitting on the Apple Board of Directors, it has long been speculated that the two companies would eventually collaborate on some kind of project.

Google has been criticized for not being very open or interacting with the web community as much as they could, but that might be changing this year. Google Blog Team member Karen Wickre says that it is unlikely that it will happen soon, but that she hopes to enable the comments feature on the official Google blog sometime this year.

The reason Google hasn't already done this, says Wickre, is that "It's a resource issue. It has nothing to do with reluctance to post criticism. We have a very small team and it's hard to gauge what the volume of comments might be; we're a lot bigger target than other sites."

Google is sponsoring a new speaker series that will bring tech industry insiders to the Google offices in NY to speak on a wide range of topics. Speakers will be from within Google itself, as well as other outside sources.

The first talk is scheduled for January 29th with Adam Boswoth, a Googler himself. The topic of conversation will be "Physics, Speed, and Imprecision: What Works and What Doesn't in Software, and Why."

Google also promises beer and wine to be served during the talk. You'll need to register if you want to attend as space is limited.

Danny Sullivan is tired of Google's scare tactics and pseudo-war on paid links.

In general, I'm pretty tired of the entire "let's police paid links" thing at this point. Google especially created the link economy, and that link genie is simply not going back into the bottle, no matter how much you try to stuff it in with nofollow might and warnings.

Tired? Yeah, tired. I mean it's just become absurd at this point. But I'll give it one more go, a stroll down memory lane in the wake of nofollow and the Paid Links War II (PLW I was fought in 2002-2003 against SearchKing).

Discussion here.