Google closes Answers, stock moves up 1%

Google announced via the official blog that they are closing the Google Answers product at the end of 2006. The Answers service allowed you to ask a question, pay a small amount of money, and get help quick. I thought it was an interesting service. How will this affect Seth Godin? I am reading his book now, Small Is the New Big, and he mentions Google Answers several times.

Let's get Hitwise and comScore on the hunt to watch the trend data for Yahoo! Answers as a result of Google closing their Answers product.  (see the update below!)

From the post:

The people who participated in Google Answers -- more than 800 of them over the years -- are a passionate group committed to helping people find the information they need, and we applaud them for sharing their incredible knowledge with everyone who wrote in.

Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.

UPDATED: 2:22PM NYC: I asked, so did Danny Sullivan, and Hitwise has provided a chart showing Yahoo Answers vs. Google Answers traffic. Hitwise reports that Yahoo! Answers has 50x more traffic than Google.