Information for Sale: My Experience With Google Answers
by Jessamyn West Proprietor, librarian.net
...
When your resume and business card say "freelance librarian" people
are often interested in what you do for a living. Finding the right
niche in a tough job market can be a challenge. When Google Answers
started accepting applications for researchers for their online
question-answering service in April, I thought I'd found my match.
Still in beta at press time, Google Answers is a fee-based,
question-answering service. If you have a question, you can post it,
set a price for it, and sit back and await a response. An answer can
currently cost from $2.50 to $200 cher newsletter, keeps tabs on the
answers, but otherwise remains fairly hands-off. Payments to
researchers from Google Central occur on the basis of how much you
have earned
I'm not sure when I first heard of Google Answers. One day my inbox
seemed full of messages from people telling me to check it out. The
interface had a fairly bare-bones setup where you could either ask a
new question or read past questions. There were only about 300-400
questions in a database with no search features, so I spent a lot of
time paging through 25 questions at a time, seeing what was there. The
questions varied a lot, people needing help finding the name of a
painting they had seen, wanting tips for a camping trip, asking for
marketing data clearly needed for their job. The application process
for researchers had three parts: Tell us about yourself, do some
sample questions, sign the contract.
I wrote them a letter stressing my library background and my
MLib. degree. I discussed my personal reference philosophy and pointed
them towards my Weblog for more information. I figured the hiring
might be quite competitive, but it turned out to be sort of first
come, first served. A week later, I received my sample questions. All
were basic research questions but with some small twist, for example:
"Name the movies in which Elvis plays a character who dies in the
movie."
Well, he only dies in one movie on-screen but is seen wandering off to
his death at the end of another. The questions were clearly designed
to separate the people who could use Google from the people who could
process and synthesize information. The online helper documents were a
bit spare and the examples given for "how to answer a question"
contained the answers to several sample questions, even some included
in the application process. I sent in my answers and waited, well
aware that many other people, including friends of mine, were going
through the same process. I signed and returned my contract via
e-mail, and then waited some more until I received my researcher
login.
In the meantime, the buzz had begun. People began to use the service
and review it. Librarians were wondering how the service Google
Answers provided differed from what a public library
offers. Discussions about the cost and value of information were
springing up. After about 3 weeks of application details, I got my
credentials and logged in. An interesting feature of the Google
interface is that everyone who uses it f people who comment, if they
provide high-quality comments. This system thus encourages both a high
degree of accuracy and eloquence on the part of the researchers, while
at the same time encouraging other people to do the same work
essentially for free, in the hopes that they might someday become
researchers themselves.
While it obviously favors Google Answers' best interests to keep paid
researchers answering questions soGoogle can receive 25 percent of the
question fee, as opposed to merely a 50-cent posting fee, many
questions still wind up being answered via the comments alone. Google
Answers encourages synthesizing comments and adding to them in order
to answer a seemingly already answered-in-comments question, but as it
also notes in its newsletter, "One of the more common reasons given
for a refund request is that a Researcher's answer didn't add
substantial value to the comments already posted." Many
question-askers also fail to rescind their question after finding
satisfactory answers in the comments, thus exacerbating this issue.
How It Worked for Me
The answering process on the backend is a bit more
nuanced. Researchers log in to a special Researcher Center, which
includes listings of past answers with the ratings they have received,
an invoice listing, and a list of questions needing answers. To answer
a question, a researcher must first "lock" it, claiming it for
themselves. A question lock used to last for 1 hour, but Google wisely
extended it to 2 hours in mid-July. The lock can be renewed by the
researcher before the hours are up. When a question is locked, no one
else can either answer or comment on it, although the locking
researcher may request clarifying information on the question from the
person who originally asked it. When a question is unlocked, it is
free for any researcher to answer; Google wisely came out against the
selling of locks early on in the game. The locking system and
accompanying phenomena highlight how Google Answers diverges from
non-fee-based information systems.
When I first began my tenure at Google Answers, there were a plethora
of questions and not too many researchers. You could examine questions
at your leisure and select the ones that fell in your area of
expertise. There was researcher camaraderie and a few forums sprang up
for researcher discussion and skill swapping, one of which
unofficially became the primary means of communication among
researchers. As the pool of researchers got larger and the pool of
questions did not grow as quickly, questions became harder and harder
to obtain and lock. Researchers no longer searched as hard for
questions in their field of expertise; they would just lock a question
first, then see if it was one they could answer. A dichotomy was
spawned between researchers who were hoping to make a living and
hobbyists like myself, who enjoyed the sport of answer-hunting and
wouldn't mind a few bucks on the side.
The software interface did not seem to be devised with fierce
competition in mind. Less scrupulous researchers discovered that they
could lock multiple questions simultaneously or devise scripts or bots
to lock questions as soon as they became available, giving them a
decided advantage. As these issues were raised to the Google Editors,
they were dealt with, but the primary sanction remained reputation
don't cause trouble and you can continue to stay in the pool of
researchers.
How It Did and Didn't Work for Me money.
In the beginning months of Google Answers, the researcher would get
paid for their answer, even if the asker requested a refund. This
policy has since changed. Now, if a refund is requested within a
specified amount of time, the researcher will not receive payment. The
economics of this system discourage people from attempting to answer
tough or tricky questions, since the questioner is the final arbiter
of whether their question was sufficiently answered. This can
sometimes get sticky because, as any librarian can tell you, sometimes
patrons do not know what they want or don't understand the nature of
reference sources. Giving good customer service in these instances
becomes a very delicate operation, especially when the financial
nature of the arrangement makes the customer believe they are always
right.
I had a particularly jarring episode that concerned the exact citation
of a quotation commonly attributed to one author. When my extensive
research netted no corroboration on the provenance of this quotation,
other than the fact that Bartlett's had dropped it from its later
editions, I summed up my research to the questioner with my annotated
opinion that the author of the quotation could not be verified. I
received a response via a "clarify this answer" feature essentially
saying, "Attributed means he said it, and I want to know when!" Is the
customer always right when the customer misunderstands vocabulary
words?
This particular episode didn't end there. My answers were then posted
to a public mailing list, where the questioner tried to determine if
they were worth the $4 he paid for them. Since my Google handle is a
rough approximation of my name, this information got back to me and
caused a lively exchange between me and the now-not-so-anonymous
question-asker. I got a one star rating out of five for that
question.
The Researchers at Google [Google always spells it with a capital R]
are supposed to be at the same time both highly experienced and
completely anonymous. Any personalizing information placed into a
comment or answer is grounds for deletion of that information and
possible suspension of the researcher. So I, as a Google Researcher,
can say that I have a degree in Library Science, but there is no way
for this information to be verified. Once a question is posted, it can
be answered by any available researcher, or commented on by
anyone. There is no way to direct a specific question to a specific
researcher without assent from the entire community. Google Answers
editors have begun attempting to discourage researchers from offering
hasty incomplete answers so that they can get to more questions, but
scarcity of questions and competition for them among a larger more
anonymous pool of researchers have made that difficult to enforce.
A researcher's specific credentials may help strengthen the answer to
a question in their stated field of expertise, but does nothing to
further the researcher's standing at Google Answers, besides keeping
them employed. Google Answers does present a Researcher of the Week
award which confers a small amount of honor, but no preferential
treatment. In this way, the assembled experiences and abilities of the
researcher pool add to Google's reputation The Economics of Selling
Information
This may sound like an overgeneralization, but it seems that when you
pay to have humans answer your questions, you often talk to so-called
experts, and when you get answers for free, you either talk to a
librarian, a random stranger, or an open source aficionado. The
difference between the Google Answers' model and the public/academic
library model appears mainly that when a librarian gives a patron a
response to their reference query, the patron tends not to argue with
her. If she tells the patron the question has no definitive answer,
that response is more likely taken as fact rather than a personal
failing on the librarian's part. The fact that all library patrons
share the time of the librarians tends to encourage a polite
acceptance that each patron's specific question is one of many needing
to be answered.
In the Google Answers arena, I have seen researchers insulted, sworn
at, and otherwise degraded by people not happy with the responses they
received, when you might think that just not paying for the answer
would be reprobation enough. Part of the Google Answers standards of
conduct include politeness and friendliness at all times and not
discussing Google policies or pricing with question askers. Catering
and kowtowing to upset customers at the expense of explaining to them
that their question was priced too low or phrased too poorly became a
trade-off I had difficulty making.
While I enjoyed my time at Google Answers, I was soured by people
asking $4 questions and not being satisfied with the depth of the
responses they received, responses that had clearly taken a fair
amount of the researcher's time. One of the strict rules at Google
Answers forbids discussing the amount of money offered for a
question. If the questioner offers too little, the researcher should
simply refuse to answer their question. Of course, in the competition
for scarce questions, this never happened, except in extreme
instances. It seemed indelicate or rude to point out to a questioner
that if they had placed a higher price on a response, they might have
gotten better research and more time from the researcher. Is the
customer always right if they want skilled research for $4 an hour?
This "customer is always right" philosophy that pervades marketplace
interactions seemed to override personal senses of reasonableness in
many cases. Google Answers is currently working on guidelines for what
kinds of questions most appropriately fit into the various price
ranges. Researchers will welcome this tool.
The fact that there are people willing to answer a potentially
difficult question for $1.87 does not mean that it is a good idea to
encourage people to expect more research for less money, especially
when supposedly interacting with experts. The Google Answers system
prides itself on having talented workers and yet at the same time
encourages may have since changed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jessamyn West is a freelance librarian and researcher. She runs the
librarian.net Web site and has made $176 working for Google Answers
over 4-6 weeks. You can reach her at
http://www.jessamyn.com/mailme.html.
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