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Spend say £500M (USD/GBP/EUR) on experts, per annum.

Imagine typing a search and getting a response: "Give us 30 mins to respond - here's a token, come back at 17:35 with your token" ... and then you get an answer from an expert, which also gets indexed.

The clever bit decides when to defer to an expert instead of returning answers from the index.

I'll leave the finer details out.

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Google Answers was launched in 2002 and retired in 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers

"users would pay someone else to do the search."

My notion isn't a rehash of Google Answers. Google pays the "someone else", not you.

You assume that a modern day tech giant would hire an army of experts, instead of just outsourcing it to the lowest bidder in the current third world country of choice.

I live in hope.

I don't think that my notion is too daft - I generally find that quality might be a profit generator.

When you are so far up the arse of your financials that you can't see sense ... you are probably profitable for now until ... you are not.

That sounds like a way for Google to spend money, not make it.

Have you seen how much Google spends on their campuses and engineers?

Quora still exists. :-)

Quora is gamed to the point where it's pretty much useless.

So, replace Google with calling the DMV?

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