It is common practice to open up Google and put forth our queries in front of the virtual know-it-all, but Google doesn’t always know the answer – it specialises in finding the location to the answer.

There are a number of sites where people can post questions and users can answer them; but one of them seems to have taken the lead. ‘Quora’ emerged in mid-2010, founded by two ex-Facebook employees. Since then, it has become a repository of a wide variety of questions pertaining to different fields.

To start off, head over to quora.com. You might have stumbled across Quora before, but your experience would have been incomplete, just like mine, as unregistered users cannot view the answers given by people. The answers are blurred, and you are prompted to sign up before you are able to view them. Either way, you can choose to sign up via Facebook, Google account, or using your e-mail address. Signing up through Google or Facebook is the most convenient.

Setting up is quick and easy

Once you have successfully signed up, you will have to follow at least five or more topics of your choice. There is a wide variety of topics to choose from, such as cooking, finance, education, health, technology, sports and movies etcetera. You are then provided the breakdown of the topics that you selected. You have to then choose at least five sub-topics to continue, and are then finally presented with your feed. You can see the top questions in each of the topics that you selected earlier. Now you are able to answer questions, comment on other people’s answers, or ask your own questions, by clicking ‘Add Question’ at the top.

Although it’s always good practice to search and see if your question has already been asked, Quora is intelligent in this regard. Once you type a question and click ‘next’, it searches for questions similar to yours, in order to get the answer if the question has already been asked, hence reducing redundancy. You will be shown a list of questions similar to yours, but if you cannot relate to any of them, just click ‘My question is new’. Next, you can tag the question with topics, to allow followers of that particular topic to see the question and be able to answer it. For example, my question was ‘Why is Twitter’s bird blue?”. I was able to tag it with the topic ‘Twitter’, so that the followers of the topic are able to see my question. I don’t specifically need to post the question in some particular section of Quora, the question will find people who will be able to answer it. Another nifty feature is that other users of Quora can edit your question title and its detail in order to make it clearer to the rest of the community. In this way, even questions are a collaborative effort.

You get rewarded for helping out others

Once you have added a new question, and added some tags to it, you will see users who are recommended by Quora to answer your question. This is where the concept of ‘Quora Credits’ comes in. Upon signing up, you’re given a total of 500 credits. Credits can be used to request others to answer your question. Some recommended users will have ‘Free to ask’ written against their name, which means you won’t lose any credits when asking them to help you with the question. However, some of them might require credits to answer a question. Once you send the request, your credits will be deducted. You can also follow a question, and promote it by spending credits, so that it gets more exposure and hence more people can answer it. You can answer questions from other users and get credits, but for that, you should have set your answer price, which is set by default to 25 credits. Other than that, people can ‘upvote’ your answer if it’s good enough and you earn credits for that. Some users can even give you credits if they want.

Comes with the standard social features

If you dig deeper into Quora, you can personally interact with people, follow them and see what questions they are answering or upvoting. And similar to other social networks, you can block or mute them if you do not wish to see their activity anymore. Another nice feature of Quora is that it allows you to have your own blog on the site. You can put tags on your blog so that it appears in search results on Quora. Blog posts can also be promoted using your Quora credits. One thing needs to be mentioned here – credits are not a currency, and cannot be purchased.

Quora has apps for both the iPhone and Android, and the apps are quite intuitive. Though you can open the site within a browser on a smartphone, it will initially prompt to install the app, since that would definitely be a better experience. There are links at the bottom of the page to go to the full version or the site’s mobile version. My personal opinion is to prefer Quora over most other sites offering answers, mainly due to the level of authenticity and perfection it has gained in such a small period of time.

The Sites:

Quora
www.quora.com

Quora FAQ
tinyurl.com/QuoraFAQ

Control of Questions
tinyurl.com/QuoraPG