Some of you may be familiar with Snopes.com. When you receive the latest strange story from your Uncle Dick via email, Snopes is the place you go to see if it’s true or false. In some ways, Snopes is the original question-and-answer site: The question always being, “Is this story true?” For example, you may wonder if Mr. Rogers really was a Marine sniper during World War II (false), or if that amazing picture of a truck that narrowly avoided falling off a cliff when it left the road is real (true). If you want to help improve the quality of email for everyone, please check Snopes before blindly forwarding the next story you get from your Uncle Dick, even if it sounds reasonable.
Certainly, you can type questions directly into Google (“Was Mr. Rogers a sniper?”) and get links to pages that may contain the answer. But the more obscure the question, the harder it is to find the answer via search. And of course, if the answer is in someone’s head (as opposed to being written down and posted online), Google won’t find it.
Unlike search engines like Google, question-and-answer (Q&A) sites let you put your question to a group of possibly knowledgeable people. The idea of Q&A seems made for the Internet, since it provides access to a vast number of people around the world, one of whom may have the right answer to your specific question. Of course, the Internet also provides access to a vast number of spelling-challenged morons and gives them the opportunity to display it when answering your question.
That’s the fundamental problem with Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com), probably the oldest-surviving example of a Q&A site. If you visit the site, you see buttons inviting you to ask a question, answer an open question or look at the answers that resolved other questions.
If you take the time to visit Yahoo! Anwers (YA), you’ll probably notice two things. First, some of the questions (“Which is better: an HP or Gateway laptop?”) would be better answered by the questioners doing some research on their own. Second, you’ll see homework questions of all sorts cut-and-pasted verbatim (“Solve for x: 4x(x-5)-5x(x-4) = -1”) into the site. It’s hard to tell whether people are stupid or lazy (answer: both, although not always at the same time).
Then you get questions on topics (like religion or politics) that clearly have no “answer,” which makes you wonder why people bother to pose them in the first place.
Even if you only glance at the site, you’ll see that writing a good question is not a skill that’s common in the population at large. At least the ones that are cut-and-pasted from homework assignments are clear (except the ones that are posted because the teacher was unclear to begin with).
It’s enough to send an educated person into a funk.
Another Q&A site, Quora (www.quora.com) launched in mid-2010 and seemed to be everywhere in tech news in January 2011. The San Francisco Chronicle titled its review “Quora—where Silicon Valley goes for answers,” making it sound something like the second coming of Christ (possibly because it was founded by two former Facebook execs).
It’s true that some of the people answering questions on Quora were well-known smart people, such as Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix) and Craig Newmark (founder of craigslist.org). If you have a question about Netflix or Craigslist, it’s hard to get more authoritative than that. Which raises the question: why should high-net-worth individuals spend their valuable time contributing to Quora? Fortunately, that very question has been asked on Quora. The short answer: It’s not obvious that any significant number of them do, in fact, spend time answering questions on Quora. Mr. Hastings has only answered five questions. Mr. Newmark has done better, with 52 answers.
My initial reaction to Quora was that it’s completely opaque. For example, if you go to the site, your immediate reaction is likely to be, “Now what?” Yet some people describe Quora as additictive, so I felt compelled to investigate further.
Probably the most useful thing you can do as a first-time visitor is to go to the bottom of the page and click “Help.” The first thing that shows up is “How do I get started using Quora?” The basic idea is that you customize the stream of questions that show up in your feed by following people, topics of interest and specific questions.
Spending a little time on Quora shows the quality of answers is generally higher than on Yahoo! Answers. It’s not clear whether that quality can be maintained as the site grows, a problem any successful Q&A site will eventually face.
As opposed to the breadth of Quora, there are also very vertically focused Q&A sites, chief among them being StackOverflow (www.stackoverflow.com), which is aimed directly at software developers. I use it when looking for specific technical answers that are likely to have come up before. You can find a pretty complete list of other Q&A sites on Quora (“What are other Q&A sites besides Quora?”).
Both Quora and StackOverflow suggest related questions, which I find very useful (and can also lead to spending more time on the site than you intended).
If, like me, you optimize your Web experience using an RSS reader, Quora offers RSS feeds, which make it easy to follow Quora activity without having to visit the site every day.
Quora is worth investigating. I’d suggest looking at a topic like “small business” (just type it into the search box at the top) or perhaps your industry (“wine business”), and then taking a look at the questions under the “Best Questions” tab to get a feel for the types of questions that get good answers. Click on a question that interests you, browse the answers, and take a look at related questions. For extra credit, take a look at the “Open Questions” under a topic. If you find a topic, question or someone whose answers seem particularly good, follow that person.
Q&A sites offer something that Google doesn’t: human responses to your specific question. Next time you’re stuck for an answer, consider using Quora (or a more topic-specific site like StackOverflow). Let me know how it works for you.
