Quora is one among the emerging breed of question and answer based search platforms that give the option of putting up as well as answering questions. Many engines do so in an anonymous manner. The thought behind Quora is: When you are interacting with users spread across the world wide web, whom you mostly do not know, having their real name offers a better perspective and perception on why one should be paying attention or what their biases may be.
Moderating Q&A flow
Knowing, for instance, that the person who is weighing in on a query about say, brain disease happens to be a scientist, or say that a known chef is contributing two cents about the right temperature at which to make a pizza, can give those insights more credibility and more accurately. Keeping this aspect in mind, Quora has on its panel community moderators governing the site interaction – for instance, deleting spam posts and marking answers, which do not actively and correctly respond to the question posed as ‘not helpful’.
It is governed in a manner that is not much different from Wikipedia. At the present moment, most queries on Quora have a greater emphasis on technology. A typical question asked recently is about how to promote a start-up company. It though, stands out in the way that it has managed to attract several notable technology luminaries and venture capitalists, most as users.
Twitter cofounder’s presence boosts Quora
In the case of the recent ‘South by Southwest’ (Annual music, film & interactive conference in Austin) question (What’s the process involved in launching a start-up at SXSW?), one of the founders of Twitter and Blogger, Evan Williams, revealed that Twitter was not actually launched at SXSW – SXSW, contrary to common belief. Such prominent participants let Quora attract more than $10 million from Benchmark Capital in venture financing, thus putting its estimated valuation at an impressive $86 million.
The site is currently small in terms of traffic flow. ComScore mentions that Quora came onto its radar first in December, registering close to 164,000 visitors in that month in the US. Quora states its own internal numbers are higher, but as of now won’t give details. Mr. Charlie Cheeve, a founder member of the site, stated that the number of users, who signed up, spiked considerably in December and also the discussion topics on the website were slowly beginning to widen. The site has registered political and local questions about popular cities and even farming questions, in the last six months. This provides a clue to things to come in terms of rising prominence and widening base.
New vertical search platforms
There are many such interesting additions to the rising spectrum of question and answer based search tools. The new vertical search platforms are boasting of crawlers scouting the Internet for the benefit of users who can then use their search facility to know answers or to get more useful information for research purpose.
