Quora’s pursuit of the holy grail: intent (a counter-view)
24th January 11
We recently posted a rant about Quora that generated a lot of conversation. One of the comments was by Leslie Barry, the founder of Iphso. Leslie made the intriguing argument that Quora actually gets closer to question-and-answer nirvana than any other service: identifying intent. Here’s his explanation of what we’re just not getting. We couldn’t be happier to hear his perspective and would like to thank him for generously agreeing to guest post.
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Author: Leslie Barry (@LeslieCBarry), Founder of Iphso
What is intent?
According to The Search by John Battelle, the holy grail of search is to interpret the user’s intent and direct them seamlessly to the content, or ideally, provide the answer directly.
If we assume that intent is not WHAT I’m asking, but WHY I’m asking it, then I believe that Quora is closer to solving the intent of search.
So how does Quora get us closer to it?
Quora’s approach is to get the best qualified people (through credentials or experience) to create some rules (boring to some, but necessary to prevent chaos – even Wikileaks has rules), then leverages the serendipity effect to overcome the constraints of similar services, like LinkedIn, to refine the best questions to elicit the best answer.
What makes Quora unique is that it uses serendipity more effectively than other services.
What is the ‘serendipity effect’?
Wikipedia defines serendipity as ‘a propensity for making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated.’
An example is the real-world benefit I’ve experienced from social media, specifically Twitter, where I meet useful people that I would never know existed without a serendipitous network – i.e., people that I didn’t know I needed to know.
Quora is leveraging this extremely well: connecting the right ‘people I didn’t know I needed to know’ to clarify intent of the question, and as a result, shortening the path to the answer.
Intent is only relevant past a certain threshold of question. Something as simple as ‘What is the capital of Maine?’ is clearly better answered via Google. No rocket-science behind the intent there, but asking something slightly more complex and ambiguous like ‘How do you consume news? Has this changed in recent years?’ presents a greater challenge. When you Google it, Google assumes:
- The question is correct
- Keyword/location/context matching is adequate
So here is what Google thinks the answer is:
…and then Bing:
They both completely missed the point without the Quora results!
Conversely, this is what Quora’s users think the answer is:
Clearly, Quora is more efficient at interpreting intent.
This is because Quora doesn’t assume the question is correct. Instead it provides the ability to ask a question and have it clarified and modified wiki-style to help shape and tease out my intent. Often as a user, I’m clear on my intent, but am not the subject matter expert and therefore unclear on how to frame the question. The iterative, near-time editing of the question helps solve this issue. Also, Quora doesn’t focus on keyword/location/context matching like a mind-less search engine. Quora’s process of refining the question by subject matter experts eliminates the extra steps of sifting through multiple, non contextual answers.
And yes, there are many planted questions (Google Link-bait pages, anyone?, LinkedIn self-promotion?, mindless waffle on Yahoo Answers?), and self-promotion, but so what?
All I care about is the quicker path from question to most valuable answer that addresses ‘what I meant’, not necessarily what I asked. My intent.
Why can’t Google or Bing use other people’s answers to opinion-type questions to decide the most relevant options to serve you? I think this is because of their strong focus on the search algorithm, which values content over context and popularity over intent. Also, Google is one-way traffic, without an iterative, refining feedback loop; we have to stumble blindly along hoping for one or two interesting search results out of ten or twenty.
As a result, it’s Quora, not a traditionally defined search engine, that’s helping us take a step towards the holy grail of intent.
It’s not perfect, but it’s challenging our approaches and thinking about teasing out intent from users. Maybe Google indexes them and learns from them? Once again, it doesn’t matter – we will have taken a huge leap from accepting that indexing and search is better than curated, considered, intelligent answers.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by BBH Labs, adverts. adverts said: Quora’s pursuit of the holy grail: intent (a counter-view): We recently posted a rant about Quora that generated… http://bit.ly/fj2GV3 [...]
[...] Quora’s pursuit of the holy grail: intent (a counter-view) - BBH Labs [...]
Is it fair that Quora privatizes question and answer content along with the behavior data / metadata?
I don’t feel good about giving them that data.
Search engines provide a good model for fair usage because they reference the content without hosting it. The canonical answer resides most often with its creator.
The move to Quora (if that’s what’s happening) is a bad evolution because the database of intentions has been centralized and privatized.
I think it’s no accident that Quora is founded by ex-Facebook employees since its model follows a Facebook model, only open to crawling and optimized for search.
Interesting view, James. Fair point that search engines reference the data without hosting it, but Quora’s behavior is no different to the search engines regarding the behavior and metadata. I think it’s more about the Quora approach to solving the intent issue than about the database of intentions being privatized. The biggest search engine on the planet earns billions based on leveraging that same privatized data. I don’t have an issue with it in exchange for the excellent free services they provide.
Hey Leslie, thanks for the reply.
Good points about search engines and their privatization of the metadata around behavior — you’re right that it’s their key to billions in revenue.
I think what I object to with Quora is that they host the source data, as opposed to search engines that reference the source data. So the creator of the source data retains agency over their data. They can block a search engine, remove the data, augment it or remove it.
If Quora is the host for the data they have privatized it and the original source(s) have lost agency over it. Quora is extractive in its approach to building value — pulling the data from experts and controlling it.
For example, blocking small search engines from accessing and indexing the Quora site through their robots.txt — http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/quora-blocks-startup-search-en.php
The culture of Quora is really what I don’t have confidence in. They extract value from people then do what they like with it, under the veneer of an ego-boosting game of expertise.
The group of users in Quora this post outlines have rarely if ever been seen by 98% of the community. Quora is primarily populated by Internet savvy, meme loaded and sarcastic intellect who answer questions with a few ounces of sincerity and loads of snark. Though I do believe this article outlines the creators of Quora ultimate intent, until the buzz cools around the site and trolling minds exit, there will continually be little to take way from a legitimate question being asked on the platform.
[...] supporter – for many of the reasons Saneel Radia outlines in his post at BBH Labs – but I think Leslie Barry also makes a strong argument for Quora’s [potential] value in providing the most relevant answers to queries and that the logic raises some interesting [...]
It’s interesting and insightful to posit that quora is doing a better job at teasing out intent.
But, Quora has a long, long, long way to go before it could replace google (or bing, or blekko, etc.) as my primary search portal to the web (which is the comparison that comes through to me in this post.)
From your example it looks like Google did a darn good job of finding (and ranking) the quora based content relative to this question anyway. Bing… WTF?
And, I didn’t have to be logged into Google to find it. I also didn’t have to have to be registered/logged into Quora to read the answers there.
Here is a big difference between Google and Quora. You can’t search *on* Quora unless you first register and log into on their site.
So for now I’ll take my Google as it is – a great (and anonymous) front end for finding information on the web… including Quora.
One-size fits-all search engines are outdated.
See also http://news.english.net.in/wisdom-of-the-language
[...] Quora’s pursuit of the holy grail: intent (a counter-view) [...]
[...] challenges are to balance quality on the one hand with usability and scale on the other. Quora has been obsessive about quality but some argue, for instance, emphasis on correct punctuation and [...]
I still don’t buy into the comparison with Google.
If anything, I compare Quora with Wikipedia: it’s a live, on demand and niche version of an encyclopedia.
And while one could argue that an encyclopedia is only about facts, while Quora combines opinions and facts, it doesn’t take an epistemiologist to point out that facts are combined and presented via acts of opinions, and opinions themselves are facts that can be portrayed.
On wikipedia.
Or on Quora.
Interesting: when I enter your question “How do you consume news? Has this changed in recent years?” into Quora it gets flagged as an incorrectly worded survey question: “Survey Questions: Survey Questions aren’t allowed on Quora right now. Try to rewrite this question so it doesn’t address the answerer and is generalizable or more directly addresses the information you are looking for. For example, instead of “What is your favorite beach in LA?” ask something like “What are the nicest beaches for families in LA?”"