Hoping to capture some market share from the hugely popular Yahoo Answers, Google has entered the “answers” market in its own — and patently simple — way.

Unlike Yahoo, where you have to go to a separate site, ask a question to members and hope that they are right, Google hopes to answer your question in search results.

For now at least, Google does it the same way it highlights your search terms in descriptions.  The twist, as far as I can tell, is that it writes the descriptions on the fly, includes them in the descriptions and highlights them.

It’s a new feature for Google search, so it will not work on all of your search queries, but it already works for popular search questions like “how tall is the empire state building” (below).

From the example below, you can also see that Google attempts to answer your question in the first search result.

This is a pretty cool feature!  Come to think of it, I am surprised it has taken them this long to integrate this into search results.

(via)

Tags: Computers, Google, Technology