Quora Details Their New Answer Ranking Scheme; Their “PageRank”, Of Sorts. As you may have seen, last weekend, Robert Scoble worked himself into a tizzy because an answer of his was moderated into a collapsed state on Quora. The whole bitchmeme surrounding the incident was rather humorous. But there was at least somewhat of a point behind all of it: people began asking more questions about the methods behind Quora’s ranking system. Today, we have some of those answers. Truth be told, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever previously stated that Quora was working on an algorithm to determine user quality well before Scoblegate happened. As he noted on January 21: (2) We’re developing an algorithm to determine user quality. Today, fellow co-founder Adam D’Angelo posted some of the details about the new Quora “Answer Ranking Scheme“. So, essentially, the methods are pretty obvious. And yes, anonymous answers are included in the above system because Quora will know who you are (they just won’t surface that information).
[image: Walt Disney Pictures] It's time you got some answers. Swingly’s Answer Engine Comes Out Of Stealth Swinging And Killing Zombies. An insane number of searches on the web involve people asking questions. Sometimes they’re good questions, sometimes they’re stupid questions, sometimes they’re insane questions. Just start typing something into Google beginning with the words “How” or “Why” for proof of this — the auto-suggest speaks for itself. Sadly, Google isn’t great at answering questions because they’re a search engine that mainly returns hyperlinks.
Sure, your answer may reside on one of those pages, but that requires another click and some browsing. A new service launching out of stealth mode tonight, Swingly, wants to perfect this task. Of course, there are many other players in this space all of whom have tried to do the same thing or something similar. Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the Texas-based startup is that they’re not pretending to be perfect.
Again, Swingly’s big claim is that no other Q&A service has yet been able to operate at the scale at which they are right now. What do zombies eat? Quora - Home. Aardvark.