Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Google answers

I still think that "you get what you pay for" should be changed to "you get less than what you pay for". But there are times when you get what you pay for. There are even times you get more : hackey sacks, bicycles, Google answers.
The quickness, generosity, and dedication of the staff seems completely unconnected to any thought of monetary reward. I have asked 9 questions, gotten pages of comments that were really answers and paid, I believe, less than 5 dollars.

There are a few problems.
You can't search or link to a particular posters questions. A non-answers Google search will find some of them but there are no boxes on the page for this. So you need to logout or use your browser toolbar. The list derived from this is also uniformative displaying things like the names of those who commented and the price of the question. For example these are mine.
There is also some funny business with logging into answers. Since I'm logged into Gmail it brings me to the answers page already logged in. I have to logout because when I joined answers it was before I had a Gmail account. The login page is then presented in a small box of the old page (instead of going to a new page with a login screen). A reload can fixes this but it can't be fixed in general. When I try to change my email address to that of the Gmail account it says I have to use an external account. Besides making logging in difficult this means that I can not use Gmail and Google answers at the same time.

No comments: