Monday, August 13, 2007

Xooxle Answers - Entrepreneurial Internet Search Service

Take a look at Xooxle Answers, which seems to be an individual's spin-off from Google Answers, which closed up shop in Dec., 2006. David Sarokin, one of the major responders at GA has started an internet answer business, Xooxle Answers. I am interested in watching the progress here.

In the meantime, David has posted two potentially helpful pages:

1. Online fulltext book resources, with nice notes explaining and evaluating each, at Books link.

2. Sarokin's Top Ten favorite online resources link. Some will surprise you, many will be familiar, some might make you worry. One thing I was happy to see what his plug for local public libraries' online resources. Yay!

3 comments:

David said...

Betsy,

Thanks so much for the kind words about my site, XooxleAnswers.com (all one word, mind you). Hope you don't mind my adding a bit of detail.

1. XooxleAnswers specializes in legal, business and academic research, and also handles personal research queries, eg, Can you help me find my long lost cousin?

2. Other former GA researchers (myself included) can be found at another new research service, Uclue.com. For anyone missing GA, this is the place to check-out.

3. The big difference between XooxleAnswers and Uclue is that all work at XA is private (only the client sees the answer) while work at Uclue is public. Both sites are fee-based, by the way.

4. Also have a look at another, quirky, research site of mine, FirstMention.com, which explores the origins of common products, places, slang expressions, etc. Not for everyone, but...

Again, my thanks for the post.

David Sarokin

Betsy McKenzie said...

Thank you for clarification and correction, David. I had posted earlier about uclue.com and the devolution of GoogleAnswers at http://tinyurl.com/2lnynw

Betsy McKenzie said...

The conversation at the earlier post, corrects my misapprehension that GoogleAnswers or Uclue worked with volunteers to answer questions (there was an application and test, and a paycheck involved in both and I guess in XooxleAnswers, as well). Makes the collaborative effort to flood answerboards with librarians (marketing libraries as resources ( see OOTJ post from August 9, 2007, pointing to "Slam the Boards!
Librarians invade the "Answer" sites
Monday, 9/10/07--All Day
Supporting Wiki: http://answerboards.wetpaint.com") all the more interesting to me.