Chen Li
Product of the future:
www.answers.com
Google is now the number one Internet brand. Its influence on people's life is significant. Who might challenge Google's position in the future?
www.answers.com might be one, it is a combination of wiki technology, dictionary, search engine, and online shops. Answers.com features a wealth of information about different topics, and uses Wikipedia for much of it. It collected authoritative facts by licensing top-quality reference work to give users reliable, concise, relevant information on each of over 3 million topics. The sources of the information include Houghton Mifflin, Columbia University Press, Thomson Gale, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, MarketWatch, Investopedia, Who2, AccuWeather, etc.
When you type key words in, Answers.com will automatically provide you with answers in this sequence: Answers.com Directory(if not correct)->Dictionary(if not correct)->Wikipedia(if not correct)->Google, and at the same time provide you with relevant commercial information. For example, if we search 'scenario analysis' in answers.com, it will give the explaination from Wikipedia, because the keyword can neither be found in dictionary nor in its own database. If you are not satisfied with the result, you can further click the 'WEB' button and the page will provide you searching results with the keyword 'scenario analysis' from Google. On the right hand site of the page, 4 books on the the subject scenario analysis are listed, together with their prize and online ordering information.
What's google's reaction on this? Recently, Google stopped linking to definitions on Dictionary.com, and started linking to Answers.com instead. There are news that Google will buy answers.com and integrate it into Google, by doing that they can greatly improve their 'Google Q&A'.
References:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/12/143721/743
http://www.answers.com
http://www.wikipedia.com