SAN FRANCISCO –– Google said on Wednesday it was pulling the plug on a fee-based Answers service that failed to catch on after being launched by the US Internet search titan more than four years ago.

Google Answers was based on an idea by the company’s co-founder Larry Page and enlisted researchers to find answers to submitted questions at rates ranging from two dollars to hundreds of dollars.

Google rival Yahoo has a popular free Answers service that taps into the online community for responses to queries and this summer Microsoft launched a similar no-charge service called Windows Live QnA.

In a rare show of defeat for Google, the online powerhouse said it would stop accepting questions this week and post the last of the answers by the end of the year.

“Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users,” software engineers Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher wrote in a blog on the company website.

“Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn’t drink water emitted by your air conditioner.”

An archive of Google Answers questions and responses will remain available at the Mountain View, California-company’s website, according to the engineers.