Quora

Quora, Inc.
Screenshot:
Type of business Private
Type of site
 Question and answer
Available in English
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Hindi
Indonesian
Portuguese[1]
Founded June 2009 (2009-06)
Headquarters Mountain View, California, U.S.
Area served Worldwide
Founder(s) Adam D'Angelo
Charlie Cheever
Key people Adam D'Angelo (CEO)
Kelly Battles (CFO)[2]
Website www.quora.com
Alexa rank Positive decrease 93 (October 2018)[3]
Registration Optional/required, can write and ask anonymously
Launched June 21, 2010 (2010-06-21)
Current status Active
Written in Python, C++[4]

Quora is a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited, and organized by its community of users in the form of opinions. Its publisher, Quora Inc., is based in Mountain View, California. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[5] Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to answers that have been submitted by other users.[6] In September 2018, Quora reported hitting 300 million monthly users.[7] Users on Quora are known for writing long, blog post-like answers.

History

Quora was co-founded by former Facebook employees Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009. When asked why they chose the name, Cheever stated, "I associate it with 'quorum' or public congregation. We spent a few hours brainstorming and writing down all the ideas that we could think of. The closest competition that Quora had was 'Quiver' but we eventually settled on Quora." [8]

Quora's user base has been growing quickly since 2010.[9] As of April 2017, Quora has claimed to have 190 million monthly unique visitors, up from 100 million a year earlier.[10]

In June 2011, Quora redesigned the navigation and usability of its website.[11] Quora made an official iOS app on September 29, 2011, followed by an Android app on September 5, 2012.

Google Search popularity of Quora over 5 years

In September 2012, co-founder Charlie Cheever stepped down as co-operator of the company, taking an advisory role.[12]

In January 2013, Quora launched a blogging platform allowing users to post non-answer content on their profiles.[13]

Quora launched a full-text search of questions and answers on its website on March 20, 2013,[14] and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013.[15] It also announced in May 2013 that all its usage metrics had tripled relative to the same time in the prior year.[16] In November 2013 Quora introduced a feature called Stats to allow all Quora users to see summary and detailed statistics regarding how many people had viewed, upvoted, and shared their questions and answers.[17][18] TechCrunch reported that, although Quora had no immediate plans for monetization, they believed that search ads would likely be their eventual source of revenue.[19]

In April 2014, Quora raised $80 million from Tiger Global at a reported $900 million valuation.[20][21][22][23] Quora was also one of the members of the Summer 2014 Y Combinator batch.[24][25][26]

Quora acquired the online community website Parlio in March 2016.[27] In April of that year, the company also began a limited rollout of advertising on the site.[28]

In October 2016, Quora launched a Spanish version of its website to the public.[29] Following this announcement, in early 2017, a beta version of Quora in French was announced.[30] In May 2017, beta versions in German and Italian were introduced.[31] In September 2017 a beta version in Japanese was launched.[32] In April 2018, Beta versions in Hindi, Portuguese, and Indonesian were launched.[33] Currently, additional versions in Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Dutch are planned.[34]

In April 2017, Quora was reported to have received Series D funding with a valuation of $1.8 billion.[35]

In September 2018, Quora reported hitting 300 million monthly users.[35]

Operation

Real name policy

Quora requires users to register with their real names rather than an Internet pseudonym (screen name);[36] although verification of names is not required, false names can be reported by the community. This was done with the ostensible intent of adding credibility to answers. Users with a certain amount of activity on the website have the option to write their answers anonymously but not by default. Visitors unwilling to log in or use cookies have had to resort to workarounds to use the site.[37] Users may also log in with their Google or Facebook accounts by using the OpenID protocol. They can upvote or downvote answers and suggest edits to extant answers provided by other users. The Quora community includes some well-known people such as Jimmy Wales, Richard A. Muller, Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the late Adrián Lamo,[38][39][40][41] as well as many current and former professional athletic personalities.

Quora allows users to create user profiles with visible real names, photos, site use statistics, etc., which users can set to private. In August 2012 blogger Ivan Kirigin pointed out that acquaintances and followers could see his activity, including which questions he had looked at.[42] In response, Quora stopped showing question views in feeds later that month. By default, Quora exposes its users' profiles, including their real names, to search engines. Users can disable this feature.[43]

Answer recommendations

Quora has developed its own proprietary algorithm to rank answers, which works similarly to Google PageRank.[44] Quora uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud technology to host the servers that run its website.[45][46]

Currently, Quora has different ways to recommend questions to users:[47]

  • Home feed questions recommendations: In this method, each user will have a timeline that is personalized to their preferences. Quora also provides "interesting" questions that are relevant to the user's preferences. This will lead to the user either answering that question or refers another user to better answer it.
  • Daily Digest: In this method, Quora sends a daily email containing a set of questions with one answer that is deemed the best answer given certain ranking requirements.
  • Related Questions: In this method, whether the user is logged in or not, a set of questions that relates to the current questions will be recommended and displayed on the side. This will help the user navigate through the questions and find what is more relevant to their preference.
  • Requested Answers: This feature enables the user to request another user's answer to a question that they feel is fit or better suited to answer that question.

Content moderation

Quora supports various features to moderate content posted by users. The majority of content moderation is done by the users, though staff can also intervene.

  • Upvote/Downvote – Users can rank answers based on how relevant or helpful they found the answers to be. This feature helps maintain the quality of content posted online.[48] The more upvotes an answer receives, the higher it is ranked, and it shows up on top of the searches related to the question. If an answer is ranked poorly, it is “collapsed” and will not show up in people’s feeds.
  • Report Answer – Users can report plagiarism, harassment, spam, factually incorrect articles, etc. This keeps sub-standard content under check.
  • Suggest Edits – Users make suggestions to improve an article by proposing changes to it. The proposed changes are also made visible to the original author of the question or answer and can be either approved and published or rejected.

Top Writers Program

In November 2012, Quora introduced the Top Writers Program as a way to recognize individuals who had made especially valuable content contributions to the site and encourage them to continue. About 150 writers each year are chosen out of 200 million monthly unique visitors. This has inspired both young and experienced writers. Top writers are invited to occasional events and receive gifts such as branded clothing items and books. The company believes that by cultivating a group of core users who are particularly invested in the site, the program creates a feedback loop of user engagement.[49]

Quora World Meetup

Quora World Meetup started in 2017 as a tradition to Quora readers and writers to come know themselves, network and have fun. Quora World Meetups are organised by group of Quora contributors with a designated lead and as a contribution from Quora they usually send branded swags, stickers to the attendees.

According to Quora, they defined the World Meetups as "This is our way of celebrating the global growth of Quora, and all of the readers and writers who have made it possible."

The last meetup had nearly 3,000 writers from over cities and the 2018 World Meetups will come up from June 20-25. All other information about the Meetups can be found on The Quora Blog.[50]

Reception

Quora was reviewed extensively by the media in 2010.[51][52][53] According to Robert Scoble, Quora succeeded in combining attributes of Twitter and Facebook.[54] Later, in 2011, Scoble criticized Quora for being a "horrid service for blogging" and, although a decent question and answer website, not substantially better than competitors.[55]

In 2014, Quora attracted controversy for using robots.txt to ask crawlers such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to not index or archive the site.[56][57] Their stated reason is that the Wayback APIs as of 2016 does not give users a way to censor answers that they may regret previously posting. Critics have raised concerns about the fate of Quora's data if the site ever goes offline and recommended Stack Overflow as an easily archived alternative.[58]

After question details were removed in August 2017, Quora was highly criticized for doing so. According to some users, the removal of question details limited the ability to submit personal questions and other questions requiring question details.[59][60] According to an official product update announcement, the removal of question details was made to emphasize canonical questions[61].

As of February 28, 2018, according to Alexa Internet, the United States makes up the largest user base at 37.1%, followed by India at 19.2%, with an overall global site ranking of 93.[62]

Timeline

DateEvent typeDetails
June 2009ProductQuora founded
March 2010FundingQuora raises $11 million in a series A, with Benchmark Capital as an investor[63]
June 2010ProductQuora announces that it will open up to the public[64]
January 2011TeamMarc Bodnick leaves Elevation Partners to join Quora[65]
February 2011TechnologyQuora chooses C++ over C for its high-performance services[66]
July 2011ProductQuora introduces video to its Q&A pages[67]
July 2011ProductQuora introduces Credits for asking-to-answer questions[68]
September 2011ProductQuora introduces threaded comments and comment voting[69]
May 2012FundingQuora raises $50 million in a series B, with Peter Thiel and Adam D'Angelo as investors[63]
September 2012TeamCo-founder Charlie Cheever leaves[70]
November 2012ProductQuora introduces Top Writers program[71]
January 2013ProductQuora introduces blogs[13]
March 2013ProductQuora introduces a policy eliminating image-only answers.[72]
April 2014FundingQuora raises $80 million in a series C at a $900 million valuation, with Tiger Global Management and Y Combinator as investors[63][73]
January 2016ProductQuora announces bounty system, offering financial bounties for the best answer (selected by the question asker) on select questions.[74]
March 2016ProductQuora acquires Parlio, an online Q&A site started by Wael Ghonim.[75]
April 2016ProductQuora announces that it will start out testing advertisements, on a small number of question pages.[76]
May 2016TeamMarc Bodnick, Quora's public face and leader of its business and moderation team, announces that he is leaving the company.
August 2016ProductQuora announces support for the Spanish language.[77]
November 2016TeamKelly Battles announced as new chief financial officer (CFO).[2][78]
April 2017FundingQuora raises $85 million in a series D at $1.8 billion valuation, with Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator as investors[79]
April 2018ProductQuora launches Video Answers.[80]
April 2018ProductQuora introduces Partner Program.[81]
August 2018ProductQuora launches the ability for users to share links.[82]
September 2018User BaseQuora hits 300 million monthly users[83]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Languages on Quora". Quora.
  2. 1 2 "Joining Quora as CFO - Kelly Battles' Posts - Quora". kellybattles.quora.com. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  3. ↑ "Quora.com Traffic, Demographics and Competitors - Alexa". www.alexa.com. Retrieved 1 October 2018.
  4. ↑ "Why did Quora choose C++ over C for its high performance services? - Quora". Quora. Retrieved February 12, 2011.
  5. ↑ "Quora's Highly Praised Q&A Service Launches To The Public (And The Real Test Begins)". Techcrunch.com. June 21, 2010. Retrieved April 6, 2013.
  6. ↑ Wortham, Jenna (March 12, 2010). "Facebook Helps Social Start-Ups Gain Users". New York Times. Retrieved March 29, 2010.
  7. ↑ "Quora introduces Broad Targeting, says audience hits 300 million monthly users".
  8. ↑ "How did DAngelo and Cheever come up with the name Quora?". Definition.net. March 12, 2018. Retrieved March 12, 2018.
  9. ↑ Lewenstein, ed. (November 28, 2010). "Quora Signups Explode". Retrieved January 24, 2011.
  10. ↑ "How many people use Quora?". "Q&A app Quora valued around $1.8 billion in $85 million fundraise".
  11. ↑ Tsotsis, Alexia (June 24, 2011). "Inspired by Wikipedia, Quora aims for relevancy with topic groups and reorganized topic pages". techcrunch.com. Retrieved April 6, 2013.
  12. ↑ Cutler, Kim-Mai (September 11, 2012). "Quora Co-Founder Charlie Cheever Steps Back From Day-To-Day Role At The Company". TechCrunch.
  13. 1 2 Constine, Josh (January 23, 2013). "Quora Launches Blogging Platform With Mobile Text Editor To Give Every Author A Built-In Audience". TechCrunch. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
  14. ↑ Russell, Jon (March 21, 2013). "Quora finally introduces full-text search to boost content discovery". The Next Web. Retrieved November 14, 2013.
  15. ↑ Constine, Josh (May 29, 2013). "Quora Brings Full-Text Search to Mobile to Unlock FAQ&As for Any Keyword". TechCrunch. Retrieved November 14, 2013.
  16. ↑ Tsotsis, Alexia (May 28, 2013). "Quora Grew More than 3X across All Metrics in the Past Year". Retrieved November 14, 2013.
  17. ↑ Gannes, Liz (November 12, 2013). "Quora Gives Its Writers a Stats Dashboard". AllThingsD. Retrieved November 14, 2013.
  18. ↑ Truong, Alice (November 12, 2013). "'Quora Stats' Tells You If People Find Your Posts Useful". Fast Company. Retrieved November 14, 2013.
  19. ↑ Constine, Josh (November 13, 2013). "Quora Signals It's Favoring Search Ads For Eventual Monetization, Launches Author Stats Tool". TechCrunch. Retrieved November 14, 2013.
  20. ↑ Constine, Josh (April 9, 2014). "Quora Wants To Stay Independent, Raises $80M Series C From Tiger Global At ~$900M Valuation". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 11, 2014.
  21. ↑ Konrad, Alex (May 9, 2014). "Quora Raises $80 Million From Tiger Global To 'Stay Independent Forever'". Forbes. Retrieved May 11, 2014.
  22. ↑ McBride, Sarah (April 9, 2014). "Tiger Global helps Q&A site Quora raise $80 million". Reuters. Retrieved May 11, 2014.
  23. ↑ "Quora Raises $80M Led by Tiger Global, Now Valued at $900Ml". Re/code. April 9, 2014. Retrieved April 11, 2014.
  24. ↑ Constine, Josh (May 11, 2014). "Q: Why Did Quora Join Y Combinator? A: It Was Almost Free". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 11, 2014.
  25. ↑ Altman, Sam (May 9, 2014). "Quora in the next YC batch". Y Combinator. Retrieved May 12, 2014.
  26. ↑ Kokalitcheva, Kia (May 9, 2014). "Meet the oldest Y Combinator startup ever: Quora". VentureBeat. Retrieved May 12, 2014.
  27. ↑ "Quora's first acquisition is Arab Spring instigator's Q&A site Parlio". TechCrunch. March 30, 2016. Retrieved March 31, 2016.
  28. ↑ "Quora begins testing ads on 'small number' of question pages". VentureBeat. Retrieved August 7, 2016.
  29. ↑ "Quora en español launches out of beta". VentureBeat. Retrieved October 21, 2016.
  30. ↑ "Launching a beta for Quora en français". blog.quora.com. February 27, 2017.
  31. ↑ "Launching betas for Quora in Italiano & Quora a... - The Quora Blog - Quora". blog.quora.com.
  32. ↑ "Launching a beta for Japanese - The Quora Blog - Quora". blog.quora.com.
  33. ↑ "Announcing Betas for Quora in Hindi, Indonesian... - The Quora Blog - Quora". blog.quora.com. Retrieved September 23, 2018.
  34. ↑ "Marketing Roles at Quora - Quora". www.quora.com. Retrieved September 23, 2018.
  35. 1 2 "Q&A app Quora valued around $1.8 billion in $85 million fundraise".
  36. ↑ "Quora Terms of Service". Retrieved February 15, 2017.
  37. ↑ Mlot, Stephanie (February 15, 2013). "Quora adds options for sharing with unregistered users". PC Mag. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
  38. ↑ Arthur, Charles; Kiss, Jemima (January 5, 2011). "Quora: the hottest question-and-answer website you've probably never heard of". The Guardian. London. Retrieved May 31, 2012.
  39. ↑ "Quora morphs from adolescence to hot property". linkedmediagroup.com. Retrieved April 6, 2013.
  40. ↑ Dishman, Lydia (January 4, 2011). "fastcompany.com". fastcompany.com. Retrieved April 6, 2013.
  41. ↑ Taber, Jane (October 19, 2011). "Quora offers clues as to why Justin Trudeau won't yet seek Liberal helm — The Globe and Mail". The Globe and Mail. Toronto.
  42. ↑ "This is a bit fucked, Quora". Giantrobotlasers.com. August 13, 2012. Retrieved April 6, 2013.
  43. ↑ "Quora Privacy Policy". Retrieved April 7, 2014.
  44. ↑ "Quora's New Algorithm for Ranking Answers". ReadWriteWeb. Archived from the original on February 7, 2011. Retrieved March 29, 2010.
  45. ↑ "Quora Signups". ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved March 29, 2010.
  46. ↑ Lohr, Steve (April 22, 2011). "Amazon Malfunction Raises Doubts About Cloud Computing". The New York Times.
  47. ↑ Yang, Lei; Amatriain, Xavier (2016-01-01). "Recommending the World's Knowledge: Application of Recommender Systems at Quora". Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. RecSys '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM: 389–389. doi:10.1145/2959100.2959128. ISBN 9781450340359.
  48. ↑ "The How-To Guide to Quora | Quora Features | Que". www.quepublishing.com. Retrieved 2017-03-29.
  49. ↑ Bea, Francis (October 30, 2012). "Quora Introduces Top Writers, Drives Attention – and rewards – to its Most Influential Users". Digital Trends.
  50. ↑ Bea, Hannah Long (September 18, 2017). "Announcing the first Quora World Meetup". THE QUORA BLOG.
  51. ↑ "V.C.'s Answer Yes to Quora". Nytimes.com. March 30, 2010. Retrieved March 29, 2010.
  52. ↑ Baig, Edward C. "Social-networking site Quora has answers to your questions". USA Today. Retrieved March 29, 2010.
  53. ↑ Yiannopoulos, Milo. "Quora will be bigger than Twitter". London: Telegraph. Retrieved March 29, 2010.
  54. ↑ "Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years". Scobleizer. Archived from the original on December 27, 2010. Retrieved March 29, 2010.
  55. ↑ "Why I was wrong about Quora as a blogging service..." Scobleizer. January 30, 2011. Retrieved August 9, 2011.
  56. ↑ Mill, Eric. "Quora Keeps the World's Knowledge For Itself". konklone.com. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
  57. ↑ McCarthy, Andrew (June 1, 2016). "How should I retrieve a deleted answer from a Quora user?". Quora. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
  58. ↑ Mill, Eric (October 15, 2014). "Quora keeps the world's knowledge for itself". Retrieved July 31, 2016.
  59. ↑ "Why did Quora get rid of question details? Isn't it rather crucial to understand over half of the existing content on the site? Why not just prevent people from adding details to new questions while retaining the details attached to the old ones? - Quora". www.quora.com.
  60. ↑ "Do you want Quora to bring question details back? - Quora". www.quora.com.
  61. ↑ "Changes to further emphasize canonical questions - Quora Product Updates - Quora Product Updates". quora.com.
  62. ↑ "Quora.com Traffic, Demographics and Competitors - Alexa". www.alexa.com. Retrieved February 28, 2018.
  63. 1 2 3 "Quora". Https:. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  64. ↑ "Q&A search site Quora opens to the public". CNET. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  65. ↑ "Meet Quora's New Grown-Up: Elevation Partners' Marc Bodnick". Business Insider. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  66. ↑ "Why did Quora choose C++ over C for its high performance services? - Quora". Quora.com. Retrieved February 12, 2011.
  67. ↑ "Quora Adds Video To Its Q&A Pages". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  68. ↑ "Quora Testing User Credits For "Ask To Answer" Questions". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  69. ↑ "Quora Gets Threaded Comments, Comment Voting, Editing And Images". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  70. ↑ Yung-Hui, Lim (September 12, 2012). "Co-Founder Charlie Cheever Leaves And Quora Is Curve Jumping". Forbes. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  71. ↑ "Quora Introduces A New Top Writers Program As A Hat Tip To Its Most Valuable Contributors". Fastcompany.com. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  72. ↑ "What is your favorite Quora policy or new feature? What Quora feature(s) should be improved or eliminated? - Quora". Https:. Retrieved October 10, 2016.
  73. ↑ "Quora Wants To Stay Independent, Raises $80M Series C From Tiger Global At ~$900M Valuation". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved July 1, 2015.
  74. ↑ "Quora Turns 80M Visitors Into Q&A Bounty Hunters With Knowledge Prizes". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved April 27, 2016.
  75. ↑ "Quora's first acquisition is Arab Spring instigator's Q&A site Parlio". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved April 27, 2016.
  76. ↑ "Quora begins testing ads on 'small number' of question pages". Venturebeat.com. Retrieved April 27, 2016.
  77. ↑ "Expanding Quora Beyond English Into Spanish". Retrieved August 2, 2016.
  78. ↑ "Foundation trustee to join Quora as finance officer". The Signpost. 2016-11-26.
  79. ↑ "Quora scores $85M funding as valuation doubles to $1.8B". Bizjournals.com. Retrieved May 5, 2017.
  80. ↑ "Expanding the Video Beta". Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  81. ↑ "Quora Partner Program Beta". Retrieved April 24, 2018.
  82. ↑ "A New Way to Share on Quora". Retrieved July 26, 2018.
  83. ↑ "Quora introduces Broad Targeting, says audience hits 300 million monthly users". Marketingland.com. Retrieved September 17, 2018.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.