Yahoo scored a rare victory over rival Google on Wednesday, as the latter announced it was shuttering its Google Answers service after four years.

Google said on Wednesday that it would stop accepting new questions for Google Answers "by the end of the year," all but ceding victory in the online question/answer sector to Yahoo Answers, the Financial Times writes. Google Answers attracts around a million visitors a month in the U.S., whereas Yahoo Answers welcomes around twelve times that number of visitors - and claims it has 60 million monthly visitors worldwide.

"Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want," according to a post on the Official Google Blog.

The move by Google to end Google Answers could be a of validation of Yahoo's move into the social-media services realm. Acquisitions such as Flickr and del.icio.us by Yahoo are part of the company's strategy to harness the power of its 500 million plus army of Yahoo members to help shape each service.