Quora facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Quora, Inc.

Screenshot of homepage
Type of business	Private
Type of site	Question and answer
Available in	Arabic, Marathi, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu
Founded	June 25, 2009; 16 years ago (2009-06-25)
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)
Revenue	US$20 million (2018)
Employees	200–300 (2019)
Registration	Yes
Launched	June 21, 2010; 15 years ago (2010-06-21)
Current status	Active
Written in	Python, C++

Quora is a popular website where people can ask questions and get answers from others. It's like a huge online library where users share their knowledge. You can also edit questions and comment on answers.

Quora started on June 25, 2009, and became available to everyone on June 21, 2010. By 2020, about 300 million people visited the website each month.

History of Quora

How Quora Started

Adam D'Angelo in 2011

Charlie Cheever in 2009

Quora was created by Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever. They both used to work at Facebook. They started Quora in June 2009.

When they were choosing a name, they thought of many ideas. Charlie Cheever said they spent hours brainstorming. They finally chose "Quora" over other names like "Quiver."

Early Years: 2010–2013

In March 2010, Quora was valued at $86 million. The website was praised for being easy to use and for having high-quality answers. Many experts shared their knowledge there.

Quora quickly gained many users. By late 2010, the site sometimes had five to ten times its usual visitors. This made it hard for the website to handle all the traffic at first. Until 2016, Quora did not show ads. They believed ads could make the user experience less enjoyable.

In June 2011, Quora changed how its website looked and worked. Adam D'Angelo said these changes were based on what worked well as the site grew. In September 2012, co-founder Charlie Cheever stepped down from his daily role. He took on an advisory role instead.

In January 2013, Quora added a feature for users to write blog posts. In March 2013, they launched a search tool to find questions and answers. This search tool also came to mobile phones in May 2013. Quora also announced that its usage had tripled compared to the year before.

In November 2013, Quora introduced "Stats." This feature allowed users to see how many people viewed, liked, and shared their questions and answers.

Growing More: 2014–2017

Google Search popularity for Quora, 2012–2017

By 2014, Quora was becoming known as a more organized place for questions and answers. It was popular in the tech world. In April 2014, Quora raised $80 million from investors.

New Features and Ads

In March 2016, Quora bought another online community website called Parlio.

In April 2016, Quora started showing a few ads on its site. The first company to advertise was Uber. Over time, the site slowly showed more ads, but still not as many as some other websites.

More Languages

Quora started expanding into many different languages. In October 2016, a Spanish version of the website was launched. In 2017, beta (test) versions in French, German, Italian, and Japanese were introduced.

In April 2018, beta versions in Hindi, Portuguese, and Indonesian were launched. Later, Quora announced plans for even more languages. These included Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Dutch.

Anonymity Changes

On February 9, 2017, Quora changed how its anonymity feature worked. Before, you could ask or answer anonymously and then change it later. After March 20, 2017, anonymous questions and answers became separate from your main account. This meant you couldn't easily switch between being anonymous and public for the same content.

Funding in 2017

In April 2017, Quora said it had 190 million unique visitors each month. This was a big jump from 100 million the year before. In the same month, Quora received new funding, valuing the company at $1.8 billion.

Recent Years: 2018–2023

In September 2018, Quora reported having 300 million unique visitors every month. Even with many users, Quora wasn't as widely known as sites like Twitter. This might be because many users didn't use it regularly or had forgotten they had accounts.

Data Incident

In December 2018, Quora announced that information from about 100 million user accounts was affected by a data incident. This included users' names, email addresses, and passwords. It also included data from social networks like Facebook and Twitter if users had linked them. Most of the affected information was already public on Quora. However, account details and private information were also involved.

New Offices and Features

By May 2019, Quora was valued at $2 billion. In December 2019, Quora announced it would open its first international engineering office in Vancouver. This office would focus on machine learning and other technical work. That same month, Quora launched versions in Arabic, Gujarati, Hebrew, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu.

In January 2020, Quora laid off some employees for financial reasons. In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Quora decided to let employees work remotely permanently.

On April 19, 2021, Quora changed its policy. Users no longer had to use their real names and could use nicknames instead. On August 5, 2021, Quora started letting people earn money from their content. They also launched a subscription service called Quora+. This allows subscribers to pay a monthly or yearly fee to access special content that creators put behind a paywall.

How Quora Works

Website Features

Quora's website uses technology that makes some parts work like instant messaging. For example, you can see when someone is typing an answer.

User Names

Before April 19, 2021, Quora asked users to register with their full real names. This was meant to make answers more trustworthy. However, users could still choose to write answers anonymously. Now, users can use nicknames.

Many well-known people have answered questions on Quora. These include Jimmy Wales (who co-founded Wikipedia), and even politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Scientists and other experts also share their knowledge.

Users can create profiles with a name and photo. These profiles show how much they use the site. Quora usually shows user profiles to search engines, but users can turn this off.

Recommending Answers

Quora has a special computer program that ranks answers. This program works a bit like how Google ranks websites. Quora uses cloud technology to run its website.

Quora recommends questions to users in several ways:

• Home feed: Your main page shows questions picked just for you.
• Daily digest: Quora sends a daily email with questions and what it thinks is the best answer.
• Related questions: When you're looking at a question, other related questions appear on the side.
• Requested answers: You can ask specific users to answer a question if you think they are best suited. Users often have short bios that mention their job or education.

Top Writers Program

In November 2012, Quora started the Top Writers Program. This program recognized people who wrote very valuable answers on the site. About 150 writers were chosen each year. They received gifts and invitations to special events. Quora hoped this would encourage more people to get involved with the site.

The Top Writers Program for English-language writers ended in April 2021. However, it continues in other languages.

Poe Chatbot

Poe is a chatbot feature created by Quora. It lets you ask questions and get answers from different AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbots. These chatbots are built using advanced language models, like those from ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI.

Poe was announced in December 2022 and launched to the public in February 2023. It became available on desktop computers in March 2023. You can use Poe to get answers from various AI models. There's also a subscription that gives you unlimited use of some chatbots and limited access to more advanced ones.

Quora Timeline

See also

In Spanish: Quora para niños

• Comparison of Q&A sites
• Yahoo! Answers