Feeling the Pressure, Quora Is Opening Up to the Search Engines

Quora, the hyped Q&A site that has most early users gushing with praise, is opening up even more after starting to accept user registrations. Now it’s made the entire site indexable by search engines, which should drive considerable more traffic to the site and also more users. But as Quora becomes larger, in order to start generating some revenue, some are questioning whether it will be able to maintain the high standards that have characterized it so far.

Fittingly, confirmation of the move came in the form of an answer on the site itself. One user asked, “Will Quora open up to Google or other search engines?” The answer came from one of the cofounders of the site.

“Yes, this will happen on August 6th. We are opening up because we are trying to make high-quality knowledge available to as many people as possible. We are committed to giving answerers control over their answers, and so you will have the ability to edit or remove your answers if you’re concerned about what shows up next to your name,” Adam D’Angelo, cofounder of Quora, replied.

Quora started with a private beta period and operated on an invite-only basis for a few months. It enjoyed a very high-quality user base and the site was praised for the level of the people using it. However, a site with a few thousand great users is not going to make any money. Recently, Quora started accepting anyone with a Facebook or a Twitter account. Already, some feel that the quality of the site has gone down.

The number of users was actually growing quite steadily and the site’s owners would have been satisfied with that for the time being, were it not for Facebook’s own plans to open up a Q&A site. Facebook Questions is still in testing, but it’s potential is obvious, if only from the sheer size of the site. While the two ventures may target slightly different audiences, Quora felt the pressure nevertheless, so it’s now opening up its content to the search engines.