Yesterday, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) said that it was dismantling Google Answers. Google Answers has been running as a paid feature for four years. Google will leave the site running but will no longer take questions.

Of course, this immediately raised speculations that Google Answers simply could not compete with the highly successful, barely one-year-old similar service from Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) -- the free Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers has roughly 60 million unique users and more than 160 million answers.

Google has long been criticized on the lack of depth in its services. Google relies on search advertising revenue almost solely. The search giant lacks vertical depths, some say, while Yahoo! has many very successful services other than search. Google doesn't have the community of users Yahoo! has, and while Google is mainly viewed as an Internet search company, Yahoo! is perceived as an Internet media company.

The success of Yahoo! Answers and the failure of Google Answers only serve to prove that point. The approaches to the service were vastly different, each company relying on its strength. Google with a technical, systematic approach, Yahoo with a more people oriented approach.

I've said before that I've heard this idea somewhere - maybe Yahoo! should concede search to Google. After all, what difference does it make if so many searches in Google eventually point to pages in Yahoo?

Of course, share price have reflected the ability of the companies to monetize their respective businesses with GOOG climbing above $500, while YHOO at $26.80 is off more than 31% YTD. This is where Yahoo! should concentrate its efforts - monetizing its existing properties. Google? Well, throwing the towel every once in a while isn't so bad and shows the company knows its own strengths and weaknesses.

Yahoo! and Netscape, oh my! Both are diving head first into the concept of "social search," integrating the mysterious ranking systems of the search engine with the cool democratic nature of the social bookmarking site. As Time Warner was preparing to launch its beta version of the new Netscape, Yahoo! was talking about integrating del.icio.us and flickr, two very very grassroots-y and user-driven properties, with the unknowable algorithms behind its search engine.

Jeff Weiner of Yahoo! says his social search will "tap the untapped authority of users" while Jonathan Miller of Netscape says "We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better."

These ideas are good and pretty but I have to wonder: how is this any different from how Google has given more weight to blogs in its search engines? How is this different from giving weight to incoming links (which are the most democratic of all democracies)? Yahoo! thinks I am the untapped authority, but really, I'm quite respectably tapped with some 8000 visitors a day to my personal blog: all through the power of my content. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg, other bloggers who fit the category are cashing checks from Google every month.

It's all lovely, and fun, and a good idea. But social search is just a new way of creating a network effect, and the end result will be no different whether you're getting popular through votes or links from your ever-expanding group of friends.