Does Social Q&A Site Quora Really Have All the Answers?

Quora founders Charlie Cheever (left) and Adam D'Angelo at their Palo Alto headquarters.
Photo: Joe Pugliese

Craig Montuori, Caltech class of 2008, knows he should devote every waking moment to the startup he cofounded last year. Yet he compulsively spends two or three hours a day on Quora, a question-and-answer website he describes as ?very addictive.?

Michael Wolfe, an entrepreneur deep into his fourth startup, also can?t help himself. If Quora sits open in his browser, he feels its tug. Someone will pose a question in one of his areas of expertise?the Silicon Valley startup scene, for example, or venture capital?and ?it?s Pavlovian,? he says: He feels compelled to respond immediately and with enough authority that votes from fellow users push his answer to the top. Wolfe has forced himself to stop using the site at work. ?If I didn?t limit myself, I?d check Quora relentlessly,? he says.

George Kellerman discovered Quora last fall. At first, Kellerman, who consults for startups looking to do business in Japan, didn?t know what to make of it. Tentatively, he answered a couple of questions. People were encouraging. He answered a few more; soon he was hooked. ?I spend practically every free moment I have on Quora,? he says. ?It?s the only thing I find intellectually stimulating on the Internet anymore.?

Quora?s founders were both star engineers at Facebook, a fact that might help explain how their young site has hooked so many users?some 200,000 people currently visit the site each month. The Facebook factor was also enough to draw scores of would-be investors before anyone knew a thing about the startup. The company has yet to earn a dime in revenue and won?t anytime soon, even as it has raised more than $11 million in financing and could drum up four times that with a few phone calls. One of its early funders, Keith Rabois, a so-called superangel who has invested in more than 60 companies, believes Quora could be the most important startup since Facebook and Twitter. Max Levchin, a PayPal cofounder and the brains behind Slide, a media-sharing site that Google snapped up last summer for $179 million, has said pretty much the same, tweeting that Quora may one day rank among the web?s 10 most valuable businesses. If Quora can fulfill its vision?getting experts to engage in its rollicking conversation and thus generate searchable and authoritative answers to thousands upon thousands of questions?then it may someday grab more pageviews than Wikipedia by filling in the gaps that no encyclopedia could ever address.

On many sites, people value the funniest or snarkiest answers; at Quora, the coin of the realm is honest intelligence and wisdom.
Photo: Joe Pugliese

Yet the love affair between tech-industry insiders and Quora isn?t just about the payday they foresee for its founders and, in a few cases, themselves. The pull is far deeper, and odder, than that. It?s hard to think of any website that has ever inspired this level of personal ardor among entrepreneurs and investors, not just as admirers or enviers but as users. These men and women (mostly men) don?t merely spend hours every day, despite their all-consuming work schedules, posing and answering questions on the site; they indulge in rhetoric that floats high above the typical boilerplate about startups changing the world. Quora is ?a micro-university,? says Chris McCoy, an entrepreneur from Sunnyvale; it?s ?the modern-day equivalent of the Library of Alexandria,? says Ari Shahdadi, a New York-based lawyer who works with startups. Savvy users like them know from personal experience that most companies fail, that new websites flare up and fizzle out like fireworks. And yet they somehow have come to see Quora as far more than just another online venture: It?s nothing less than an extended family, a virtual salon, a potential revolution in knowledge.

For that revolution to succeed, Quora will need to achieve something even more implausible. It will need to replicate?in hundreds of communities and fields of expertise far from San Francisco Bay?the same kind of fervent engagement that it has sparked among Silicon Valley insiders. The site has already shown what it can accomplish inside a small biosphere of like-minded people with high IQs and outsize ambitions. That was the easy part. The big question now is: Can Quora really hope to answer everything?

In 2005, The Onion imagined a new product from Google called Google Purge. Its purpose was to delete from our brains any information the search giant could not index. What?s the use of harboring private experiences, after all, if they can?t be cataloged and accessed via search?

Google Purge was a joke, of course, but buried inside the satire was a kernel of seriousness. Two decades after the invention of the web, there are vast areas of knowledge and experience that are still not online, let alone searchable. Wikipedia, which just recently celebrated its 10th birthday, is astonishing in its breadth and scope, but there?s only so much that any encyclopedia, limited to verifiable facts about discrete nouns, can capture within the entirety of human knowledge. On the other end of the spectrum, sites like Facebook and Twitter allow people to describe their lives and to make personal observations, but on such networks it?s hard to separate the informed opinion from the pure speculation.

The large expanse between the two approaches?the purely objective and the purely subjective?is the terrain that Quora hopes to occupy. What was it like to live in Silicon Valley in 1998? What goes on neurologically when a song lodges inside a person?s head? What should the Winklevoss twins have done to protect their idea for Facebook? Will human consciousness ever be transferable to a computer? Those are questions no encyclopedia could ever hope to answer fully, and yet in each case, there are people who can tackle them with a fair bit of authority. For years, blogs have occupied this territory, but their idiosyncratic and diaristic style has left their insights largely inhospitable to search. By creating an environment for members to post and answer questions, as well as rate the quality of others? answers, Quora is building a searchable repository of information while it also builds a community.

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