Google Baraza | Hacker News Reader

Google Baraza

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100 pointspathikrit68 comments

"What is Google Baraza?"

"I am a member of the Google Baraza team. One of Google’s goals in Africa is to make the internet more locally relevant and bring more people online. One of the challenges of the internet in Africa is that there is a lack of local content online. At Google, we find that users search for information about local businesses, entertainment, health, etc but often don’t find it because the information is not yet available online. In order to help bring more local content online, Google engineers have created Baraza to allow people in countries across Africa to ask questions and post answers to questions from others.

Here are some quick tasks to try out

- Answer a question on your favorite topic - Find a question by browsing labels (e.g.,"Programming & Design") or Search (e.g., "Economics")

- Ask a question that you have been wondering about [...]" http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=3084c339e2379cf8

So, minus all the lofty goals, this is Google Answers for Africa.

I'd be interested to know what Q&A services Africans already use.

Also notably, the answer linked is from October 2010, so this has been in use for a while.

I'm curious what modifications you made to Baraza for making it more available in Africa?

I assume low-bandwidth measures are taking into account (text-only, sms access seems to be popular in Africa, weird addresses (more like orientation vs. popular landmarks, ...).. Could you give us more details about those changes? Those decisions really interests me...

Are any of these Africa-specific pieces?

Just a few of the questions I picked off:

> What is the meaning of stonehenge?

> What is public enlightenment?

> Is politics vicious?

Are these answers necessarily local to Africa?

> What is the meaning of stonehenge?

That's probably a joke http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg

Why, you think Africans won't be interested in answers to those?

I'm just saying - what's the purpose of having a "local" african answer to this? Will the answer to that question by impacted by the geography of the people searching? Probably not.

There are plenty of good use cases for having a localized search answer for Africa - but many of the questions that I saw after a quick preview didn't seem to make great case studies for that purpose.

Why should Africans use this instead of existing Q/A sites like Quora?

I don't understand why Quora seems to be a standard to some. It hides it's answers behind a registration wall and ask that you give it access to your Facebook profile on registration.

It's a creepy website from my perspective.

Not to mention quietly setting up a public profile page in your name that starts showing up among top results when people search for you. Creepy is right.

Perhaps the french version? http://www.google.com/baraza/fr/

Bandwith measures seems to be important, local infrastructure (lower ping), text-based access, ... many things to think of.

A lot of website use appeals when it has a local flavor. Quora and it's Silicon Valley answerers probably doesn't know how to answer the questions that many Non-US citizens might have. This has a lot to do with user base, and I don't see Quora marketing itself outside of America.

> I don't see Quora marketing itself outside of America.

Quora gets more traffic from India than the US. At least 30% of its user base is Indian[1]. Quora does very well overseas.

[1]:http://thenextweb.com/in/2013/02/26/india-passes-the-us-to-b...

How come Google releases new software that is not using https, and still I'm logged in with my account.

I'm surprised google can still make that mistake, making my account vulerable after going to so much trouble of protecting it with 2factor auth.

Are you sure that the Google authentication token(s) sent over HTTP can actually be used to perform sensitive actions (e.g. reading/sending mail, changing settings)?

That is, perhaps Google require an HTTPS-only token for sensitive actions and the authentication token sent over HTTP is only used for basic personalization (like showing your username) and some unimportant actions?

Though I guess we know that someone who has stolen your HTTP authentication token could ask embarrassing baraza questions on your behalf ...

No, I'm not sure and your questions are valid. But wouldn't you be happier if they used https and the questions wouldn't have to be asked in the first place?

This practice of having a website respond to both http and https simply has to die. Google is not the only offender here, but I expected more from them, because they are very security sensitive.

Google, next time you accuse Chinese of hacking you, reconsider your practices.

I agree, it would be good to see Google setting the trend here by going HTTPS everywhere. Personally I think the next website I create will be all-HTTPS.

The main reasons I encounter for not going HTTPS everywhere are:

1) Possible negative effect on search engine ranking during transition period.

2) 3rd party content from analytics tools and advert networks not supporting HTTPS.

3) Slower initial page load over mobile due to SSL handshake.

4) No-one else is doing it.

Hopefully these reasons will become less valid over time!

Nr. 3 is very problematic for satellite connections, which have extremely high latency, making HTTPS websites unusable. I guess that is why Google went with plain HTTP in Africa.

This isn't only a consideration for Africa- I am in rural Missouri, USA, and I am stuck with a satellite connection. HTTPS sites are several times slower than their HTTP siblings. The problem, as I understand it, is that my service provider can't compress the pages before sending them over the satellite link.

There's actually no excuse ... SSL is cheap today and by terminating it at a load balancer or proxy, you don't even have to think about its impact on web-server performance. I imagine that Google has racks of equipment dedicated to SSL termination already!

Well, I see the same news (on Google Baraza) has been doing rounds on HN since 2010 :D. So its definitely not new software.

YouTube defaults to HTTP as well. The security threat is pretty minimal, but an evil captive portal could sneakily grab your signed-in Google email if they wanted to.

This looks like an attempt to mimic the Quora or StackOverflow format of Q&A, but the structure isn't there. There doesn't seem to be much organizational structure beyond the top-level "Government" or "Computer Software" categories. It appears to have been around since 2010 or so - there are some users that have been contributing for a while (e.g. ivan - http://www.google.com/baraza/en/user?clk=tpct&userid=0708787...).

What is the purpose of recreating English-language Q&A structure in such a poor form?

Gathering question answer pairs for training their answering algorithm in google search.

> Baraza is not supported on your browser

Displayed in Chrome-based Opera that sends Chrome's User-Agent string and deliberately doesn't even mention "Opera" in the header.

It's so annoying that Google keeps discriminating against other browsers even when there can't even be a vaguest technical reason to do so.

Why would even simple Q&A site need to require only handful of latest browsers? Why is Google still using User-Agent sniffing? (they have top-notch web developers who all know how stupid that is...)

Will Baraza questions and answers be ranked higher than Quora and Stack Overflow in Google search? When Google starts adding more services with content created by users, will it be harder to rely on Google search?

The fact that 3 years after it was started, most of us still don't know of it means Baraza questions are clearly not ranked higher than other results :)

This is a good question.

At one point is google "impartial" search engine or when does it become a funnel to their own services?

You can see it started to happen with the ITA flight software acquisition a few years back (http://www.google.com/press/ita/) - now google flights now beat out every booking engine for any flight query.

I doubt that Google will ruin the integrity of their search results because they want to push Baraza.

They do have widgets such as Google Flights pop up when it is clear the user if looking for airline tickets but that's not an indication that Google funnels all their own services for the heck of it. First of all, the widgets such as Flights and People Bios are not in the actual search results, but appear as separate sections. I believe the actual search results are sacred and are exempt from being tampered with, even for Google's motives.

Second, flights are a very specific and objective thing which makes their Flights widget extremely useful. If I'm searching for "flights from lax to ord", I'm going to get all flight times available without even leaving Google. The same cannot be said for most services such as Baraza, where the quality of answers/questions is very incomplete and subjective.

Their flight widget is the second thing in the search results (right under the ads) and above any actual results. That alone - says they're prioritizing the money-making options.

The place under the ads and above the search results is just where they put stuff like the calculator, sports stats, and other easter eggs. Yes they make money off the Flights widget, but that doesn't automatically mean it's bad for the user. My point was that the Flights widget is great and more useful than the actual search results when you query for "flights to lax" just like the calculator widget is more useful than the search results when you query "sin(50)*1234". They are prioritizing useful widgets, and this one happens to make lots of money.

Note: this URL will be 404 if you're using an "https everywhere" extension. Revert to http:// URLs and it will work.

I don't know which I feel sadder: that I'm logged in a service which I did not agree for, or that I've lost will to try out anything from Google.

the NSA deal and (more importantly) Google Reader shutdown really did it to me. As soon as I find an alternative to gmail I'm leaving Google service wholly.

I hope you figure out a way to ensure that service doesn't also shutdown. Just because you pay for it, doesn't make it invincible.

I think you're mad at SaaS, not Google. I don't see the shutting down a CORE offering anytime soon.

I know I'm mad for irrational reasons. I think you are right that I'm mad at SaaS as well.

Yes, services shut down. That's just the way it is, or at least how I figure.

The thing about Google Reader was that it was one of the reasons that got me interested in Google other than the search engine; then I discovered gmail, and etc. I've felt that Google was one of the 'good guys', and lately, I just don't feel the same way. I guess I'm quoting the Google Reader shutdown as what symbolizes the change.

Having said that, I doubt I will try many things from Google, not because of the fear of them shutting down, but because it won't do much for me.

That's new. /s

(http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-11-16-n46.html)

It looks like Google Forums but with StackOverflow-style votes. I guess they didn't really use aardVark for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine). I wonder why they didn't try to make a bigger Q&A service, maybe integrated with G+.

I highly doubt this is a serious product google will be pursuing. looks like a low level offering for developing countries/markets

Where are the points coming from ? I seem to have 24 points while I never used this service. How about you ?

The 24 points seem to be the "initial sign-up bonus" and a "daily login bonus". I got my initial bonus in 2011 it seems, so this must be an older Google service that was just renamed and re-launched.

To me, I actually see this as Google crowdsourcing the data necessary to have "answers" appear rather than search results for those things that make sense to.

I was thinking more along the lines of upping their game against Siri.

Question for the Baraza team: The framework looks good, and I expect the engineering behind the scenes is impressive. What are your thoughts about content curation and acquiring a critical mass of (for want of a better term) moderators?

See (for example) this question and its answers http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=618ce3dee8dafc67

Whenever I hear of a product from Google, the first thing I wonder about is when they plan to retire it. I'd rather patronize alternatives.

They shut down Google Reader, because it is "....unuseful" ?!? And now they launch Google Baraza, because it is ... what ????

Google Baraza was launched in 2010.

Deleted comment

Who are "foreigners" for you? That's a bad term on internet forums because people from all over the world use sites like HN, making "foreigners" somewhat meaningless/confusing.

"One of Google’s goals in Africa is to make the internet more locally relevant and bring more people online. One of the challenges of the internet in Africa is that there is a lack of local content online. At Google, we find that users search for information about local businesses, entertainment, health, etc but often don’t find it because the information is not yet available online. In order to help bring more local content online, Google engineers have created Baraza to allow people in countries across Africa to ask questions and post answers to questions from others."

http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=3084c339e2379cf8

That clears things up.

Who the hell is a "foreigner" on the internet?

It looks like a row-rent version of SO, targeted at Africa.

The muffin stump of Q&A software: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eipl17WpOo&t=12

http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=6551f90c5ef62dc2&...

An answer to the question "What is Google Baraza?":

http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=3084c339e2379cf8

I wonder why they chose not to allow commenting on questions (possible on Quora or Stack Exchange). Allowing comments could help improve existing answers, but I guess it would add more noise.

Without proper moderation, it's going to be filled with junk.

What am I missing? Is this Google Answers under a new name?

Don't want to log in, sorry. See no point for them to see my account if I want to use the thing in view mode.

I like the one that asks "Why Google collaborate with the NSA?"

The one response is "you crazy".

lol. first one on the question lost when i clicked

http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=76951fbe3c65173e

Is it because Quora's questions are behind the walled gardens?

also → http://otvety.google.ru

Oh, Oh... time-consuming website!

404

Wow that is ugly.

They shutter google reader, and this is what we get.

Fuck.

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