There was a UK service called AQA that would answer questions for £1 back in the mid 2000s. They started off super super useful, but quality degraded enough as they scaled that it was no longer worth it. Used to be able to say "which shops in a 20 mile radius have xus in stock", or "who should I complain to about the service in xyz bar" and get great answers, but as they automated it more and more you'd just get back vague info

I was briefly an AQA employee. You were paid per question, so all you really cared about was how quickly you could send an answer and move onto the next question. The quality of the answer didn't matter, unless the customer complained and got a refund, which virtually never happened.

Poor metrics win again!

Yeah, we've been receiving a lot of requests like this. Right now we are doing our best to handle them all because we believe that happy users will be purchasing customers. We'll have to see how it goes.

That could be done by charging a standard fee for the operator's time spent searching.

Or a Magic Gold premium membership, if people want to ask non commerce questions beyond the first three free ones.

Seems like maybe a get-together with Watson api docs is in order.

With no pun intended, Watson isn't magic.

Maybe they could respond "sure, our researchers can find this for you for just $3, here's a link to add your credit card to your profile".