Answers.com Getting Cuts

[Renegade]

Ouch...

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/27/answers-com-gets-gutted-by-its-new-owner-massive-layoffs-ceo-and-cto-out/

According to Israeli business paper Calcalist, 45 out of 65 employees in the company’s offices in Israel were fired, including founder and CEO Bob Rosenschein and CTO Jeff Schneiderman. Another 25 employees or so work out of the United States, but it remains unclear if all of them have also been given a pink slip.

Oh well.

If it were StackOverflow/Exchange, I'd be sad.

[40hz]

Seems like a huge amount of money to pay just to get a good domain name. 

Also wonder if their dropping 1-Click Answers has something to do with Xerox's patent infringement claim pending against Google and Yahoo?

According to an article in the SEO by the Sea website:

The case number in US District Court for the District of Delaware is 1:10-cv-00136-UNA, and answers haven’t been filed yet by the defendants.

Within the complaint, Xerox claims that the processes described in their patent System for automatically generating queries , are being used to automatically generate queries based upon the content of web pages that show related advertisements through Google’s Adsense and Adwords programs, as well as through Yahoo’s Search Marketing and Publisher Network.

Yahoo’s Y!Q Contextual Search, which I believe is no longer available, is also described in the complaint as “a system that automatically generates queries based on the content of web pages to retrieve information related to the pages.” I did write about Y!Q a while back, and you can get an idea of how it worked from my post, if you somehow missed it – Y!Q didn’t seem to catch on with a wide audience.

The other Xerox patent, Method and Apparatus for the Integration of Information and Knowledge, is claimed as being infringed by Google Maps, Google Video, YouTube videos and Yahoo Shopping.

Read the full article here.

[Renegade]

I have domain names that I'm willing to sell for less than $127 million if anyone is interested... 

[mahesh2k]

Answers.com got hit by google panda update and google fanbois are making sarky remarks on almost every website out there in order to get it out of the first page. So chances are there that some quick answers sites like ehow/answers/mahalo/about.com are going to suffer.