Quora’s Search for What the Internet Doesn’t Know

A Q&A with former Facebook chief technology officer Adam D’Angelo, founder of Quora.

When Quora launched in 2010, it seemed like there was little space for a major new source of information on the Internet. Social networks and news sites took care of current affairs, from personal lives up to worldwide events; Wikipedia rounded up reference information from online and offline sources. Three years later, Quora has made a good case that the Web was missing out on a valuable knowledge source. By encouraging people to write down their personal experiences, expertise, and advice, the site has compiled some arresting content of the kind that marks the most memorable of face-to-face conversations. Examples range from an astronaut trainer explaining prelaunch rituals to an inside account of Apple’s culture of secrecy. D’Angelo talks about how Quora differs from other web offerings. “There have been a lot of algorithmic attempts to organize the world’s knowledge: there’s Google, there’s IBM’s Watson. But there’s all this information in people’s heads that’s not written down on the Internet. We want to get to the state where if there’s someone in the world that knows something, we can tell you that.” Asked about whether letting people ask questions and write answers leads to a lot of bad content, D’Angelo said: “That’s why we are more of a tech company than a lot of Internet companies. We can predict which content is good and only show you that.” D’Angelo added that Quora’s recommendations are more reliable than other sites like Netflix and Amazon, because the software knows something about the person who wrote it, their previous answers and who liked them and who didn’t. If the answer meets a certain quality threshold, “then we surface it on the site and notify people following that topic or question.”