Score One for Yahoo!

Google(GOOG) said Wednesday it would shut down its Google Answers service -- the first significant tool to be killed by the search giant, a company spokesperson confirmed.

The service, which answered queries about endless subjects and ran for nearly four years, will cease to accept questions after the new year, but its archives will be maintained, according to the company's own blog.

"The time for the product has past," said Google spokesperson Sunny Gettinger.

But tell that to rival Yahoo!(YHOO) While the Internet media company launched its own Yahoo! Answers and Knowledge Search service only in December 2005, it has already drawn 60 million unique users worldwide and provided more than 160 million answers.

Yahoo! Answers currently accounts for 24 times as much traffic as Google Answers.

Yahoo! Answers is a free service that allows all Yahoo! users to contribute. Google's offering, meanwhile, lets users post questions along with the amount they'd pay for answers, which would be farmed out to a prescreened community of Google researchers.

But in this case, Yahoo!'s more free-wheeling approach proved to be more successful.

"Almost everyone is an expert when it comes to something," says Eckart Walther, Yahoo!'s vice president of products for Yahoo! Search. "You don't have to be a genius or a rocket scientist to have an answer to a lot of things."