Ask.com has announced it’s ditching search in favour of focusing on being a Question and Answer-based service, though their have been rumblings of this for a while now. Q&A is quickly drawing a crowd, with Google buying up Aardvark (and then setting it down quietly in Google labs), ex-Facebook employees launching Quora and, on a smaller scale, a change of plan for Stack Exchange.
Apparently no news yet on whether Jeeves will survive the latest changes but there is a nice summary of the Ask.com announcement in the NY Times.
We will be casting a reference librarian eye over these various Q&A services over the next couple of weeks and it would be great to hear your thoughts on this proliferation of Q&A sites.