Google has a long history of shutting down or discontinuing its products, services, or features. Earlier this month, the company announced to shut down its Shopping app for Android and iOS. And now, the tech giant has announced that it is about to shut down the “ask and answer” feature on Search. Google has sent out announcement emails to users who have ever made contributions to the Q&A feature of Search, stating that the company will be shutting down the feature on April 30. One such email has also been sent to me, the part of which you can see in the screenshot below.
As per the announcement email, the “ask and answer” feature on Google Search will be shut down by the Mountain View-based tech giant on April 30. This means that Google Search will stop showing the frequently asked questions and answers that appear atop search results. However, the company says that all of the question-answer user contributions will stay on the “your contributions” page of users until June 30. After June 30, these will also be removed from the users’ “your contributions” page. So if you want, you can download all of your contributions before they’re removed by Google after two months.
Ask and Answer Feature on Search: How to Download Your Contributions
“Ask and Answer” on Search has been a very useful feature for users to get answers to their questions on Google. But now it’s being shut down, and existing questions and answers will also be removed. To recall, Google introduced this feature a few years back and it populated the top position of relevant search results with answers to the query. It also provided users the option to ask questions and other users could answer them. But since it’s now going away, here’s how you can download your contributions before they’re also removed.
Although Google is removing all the questions and answers from the Search query page from April 30, users will still be able to download all of the questions and answers they’ve asked until June 30. To do so, you need to go to Google Takeout and sign in with your Google account. Next, select the “Search contributions” option and it’ll automatically generate a record of all of your contributions. After the record is created, you’ll receive an email with a download link for the same. Just click the download link to save your contributions on your local storage.
Note that if you still want your profile to be discovered in search results, you can create your own “people card.” To create it, just type the query “add me to search” in the search box inside the Google mobile app or the mobile website. Next, follow the steps prompted to you.
