Quora

Quora[5] (/ˈkwɔːrə/) is a social question-and-answer website and online knowledge market headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009,[6] and made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[7] Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users.[8] As of 2020, the website was visited by 300 million users a month.[9] History Founding and naming

Adam D'Angelo, photographed in 2011

Charlie Cheever, photographed in 2009 Quora was co-founded by former Facebook employees Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009.[3] In an answer to the question, "How did Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever come up with the name Quora?" Cheever wrote:

We spent a few hours brainstorming and writing down all the ideas that we could think of. After consulting with friends and eliminating ones we didn't love, we narrowed it down to 5 or 6 finalists, and eventually settled on Quora. The closest competition that [the name] Quora had was Quiver.[10]

2010–2013: Early growth In March 2010, Quora, Inc. was valued at $86 million.[7] Quora first became available to the public on June 21, 2010, and was praised for its interface and for the quality of the answers written by its users, many of whom were recognized as experts in their fields.[7] Quora's user base increased quickly, and by late December 2010, the site was seeing spikes of visitors five to ten times its usual load—so much that the website initially had difficulties handling the increased traffic.[11] Until 2018, Quora did not show ads because "...ads can often be negative for user experience. Nobody likes banner ads, ads from shady companies, or ads that are irrelevant to their needs."[3]

In June 2011, Quora redesigned the navigation and usability of its website.[12] Co-founder Adam D'Angelo compared the redesigned Quora to Wikipedia, and stated that the changes to the website were made on the basis of what had worked and what had not when the website had experienced unprecedented growth six months earlier.[12] In September 2012, co-founder Charlie Cheever stepped down as co-operator of the company, taking an advisory role.[13] The other co-founder, Adam D'Angelo, continued to maintain a high degree of control over the company.[3]

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

2014–2017: Continued growth and new features

Google Search popularity for Quora, 2012–2017 2014 organization Quora was evolving into "a more organized Yahoo Answers, a classier Reddit, an opinionated Wikipedia", and became popular in tech circles.[3] In April 2014, Quora raised $80 million from Tiger Global at a reported $900 million valuation.[21][22] Quora was one of the Summer 2014 Y Combinator companies,[23] although it was described as "the oldest Y-Combinator ever".[24]

Parlio acquisition In March 2016, Quora acquired the online community website Parlio.[25]

Question details Users were able to add descriptions to questions. On December 8, 2015, these were limited to 800 characters, and questions themselves to 150, not affecting existing questions.[26] On August 3, 2017, question details were discontinued entirely and replaced with an optional source URL input field to provide context, reportedly to encourage users to phrase questions more descriptively. Existing question details were stored in comments under respective questions.[27]