

Whatever happened to Quora? - ignifero
http://www.google.com/trends?q=quora&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0

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tdmackey
The spike probably had a lot to do with the release of Tron: Legacy on
December 17 who had a character named Quorra which could easily be misspelled
as Quora. The trend for Quorra largely follows this spike as seen at
[http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra&ctab=0&geo=all...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0)

Nothing happend to Quora.com.

~~~
Tycho
Hmmm. Is this an established practice for choosing product names? (regardless
of whether it was intentional in this case)

Excuse me while I look up the cast list of the next James Cameron movie.

~~~
RBr
The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave
would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate.

A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the
brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to
negate these few users.

~~~
pacohn
> _The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately
> leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate._

Would that be a bad thing? Even those that left would then know that your site
existed, which isn't without value.

As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very
difficult to make a suit out of this. If anything, you could then change your
name slightly, and get some press about it.

~~~
Mystalic
They'd have a negative association with it, since the site didn't give them
what they wanted. You don't want to start your first impression with a
negative.

~~~
Tycho
Possibly the majority of people would know what it was before clicking,
because the search engine description would tell them. In that case they're
just fulfilling their curiosity, which can only be good.

~~~
ElliotH
You'd be surprised how many people don't read the description in search
results.

------
ajays
Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area.
That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-
chamber.

~~~
ootachi
That's the problem with Quora for me. When it first started to get big, I
tried searching for things that weren't startup- or Silicon Valley-related,
and the results were practically nonexistent. Maybe that's changed since then,
but it didn't give me a good first impression. Not that there's anything wrong
with a Q&A site for startups - that may well be a very good niche - but Quora
clearly seems to want to be something more, and it seems that they're having a
hard time breaking free.

~~~
shadowsun7
This is slowly changing. For instance, see: <http://www.quora.com/Ashton-
Kutcher>

~~~
andrewcooke
Ha. I guess you don't realise he's on there because he's an investor in early
tech companies in the Bay Area? And he's been there for ages.

~~~
shadowsun7
I do know that. My point is that of his answers: Kutcher is a movie industry
insider, and he responds to questions about the movie industry.

~~~
thwarted
I found his content on quora hard to read because of the spelling mistakes and
general lack of formatting (stream of thought style of writing does equate to
easy to consume writing). And even though people had suggested edits, he never
seemed to accept them/fold them back into his post.

------
benologist
TC pumped and dumped them. It will be interesting to see if they can stand on
their own two feet but I doubt they will. The homepage is anti-new users, and
if you register in spite of that you better subscribe to _popular_ topics or
else you'll have no new content and no reason to come back.

~~~
wwkeyboard
I wonder how much of the new-user experience is to avoid an eternal september?
Allowing people to easily sounds off on a few things and leave(like I'm doing
right now) is not conducive to building a community.

------
RBr
Google Trends monitors search terms, not traffic. The Google Trends graph is
relative to the total search volume for the keyword Quora.

Web traffic is a very different thing. It's how many people actually visit a
site. Here's an estimate of Quora's traffic:
<http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com>

You can see that while they've experienced a significant peak in traffic that
has resulted in a recent decrease, they're doing very well.

~~~
erik_p
^^^ I came here to say this. With that said, I'm a little sick of the quora
hype. I have a love/hate relationship with the UI decisions they made. I
haven't had a ton of luck with the questions I've asked on the site, but I
have found it useful when researching existing (answered) questions. Although
those questions tend to be very valley/startup centric.

------
hucker
I guess the hype is wearing off? It was bound to happen when it was
evangelized like the second coming of christ by TechCrunch et al. I'm guessing
that the vast majority of users is realizing that it's not much more than a
new Q&A-site that was fortunate/skilled enough to get a lot of Silicon Valley
elite on board as users at an early stage.

It will be interesting to watch Quora in the coming times, they're facing some
of the same troubles as HN is facing: it gained popularity because the quality
of content was high due to the contributors often being well-connected SV-
elite. Now they're facing the backlash of popularity; low-quality content on
both the Q and A side of the equation.

EDIT: Not to say that SV-elite means guaranteed quality content, but "they"
provided(provides?) a lot of interesting insight on Quora.

------
rudiger
Generally, this is how most sites work. For each successive wave of
popularity, they'll experience a spike followed by a decline, but the decline
is to a higher level than it was pre-spike.

------
robk
Trends for Websites is much better for actual site traffic estimates.

[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all...](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all&date=ytd)

------
rrhoover
Quantcast (<http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com>) and Compete
(<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/>) are better tools to measure
traction. Looks like they've had a slight decline lately. With all the buzz
they received early this year, I'm not surprised it's lower.

~~~
codingthewheel
Respectfully disagree - Compete and Alexa both depend on toolbars, and no
techie in his right mind wants to install such a thing. Quantcast doesn't use
a toolbar, but it's heavily biased towards Quantcast-aware publishers who
place the QC script on their pages. Long story short: these sites are bad for
measuring traffic, but especially bad for measuring tech / power user / early
adopter traffic.

~~~
rrhoover
Compete and Quantcast (if not "Quantified") are not good measurements of
actual traffic estimates but they can usually report trends somewhat
accurately. However, you make a great point about the tech/early adopter crowd
which are the primary users for Quora.

------
yakto
They're doing ok, probably just a mini-sharkfin from a wave of press.
Interesting that HN is over half as big:

[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com,news.ycombinat...](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com,news.ycombinator.com&geo=all&date=all)

------
robryan
That's based off search volume on the term isn't it? Meaning that there was a
spike of new people hearing about the service. Just because the initial media
attention has come off doesn't mean those attracted in the spike aren't still
around.

------
gallerytungsten
I find the Quora interface and usability to be kind of clunky and finicky.
Their "walled garden" site rules are also a bit finicky. While it was
interesting to poke around Quora a bit, I didn't perceive much value for
myself.

------
igorgue
People realized it sucks :-) And Techcrunch that it's not worth to talk about
it?

------
inmygarage
Quora got a ton of press right around the end of the year - big articles in a
lot of major press outlets. That likely accounts for at least some of the
spike.

------
duncanj
I feel like on Quora the same 10 people are writing the majority of the
content (and it is getting boring). Maybe I'm not using it appropriately, but
if so their interface isn't helping me improve my experience.

------
bauchidgw
such peaks of brand interrest are quite common for new and hyped internet
brands/startups. now comes the time of constant but slow(er) growth or
failure.

