[devjab]

I wonder if it would really come down to AI if you did the user research, maybe focused on the “onboarding” process. I remember a time back when you would get a Quora result on a search query and you could click on it be find a few answers with comments on them to help you determine their merits.

This is completely anecdotal, but these days I honestly can’t even find the answer if I click on a Quora result on a search engine. Instead I’m created by “similar” questions and what not in an UI I don’t really understand too well. Now, I was never a Quora user, as in, I never signed up for an account. So I’m probably not in their target audience. With their modern entry point, however, I’ve simply banned their domain from my search results along with sites like Pinterest because they are essential just a wasted of time if I accidentally hit their sites.

Maybe that doesn’t matter. I would have probably never signed up to actually answer things, or even ask, but if anyone who would be potential user is like me. Then they won’t ever get to the “onboarding” process of joining the site, and I’d wager that was more damaging than AI. LLM’s are more akin to the final nail in the coffin for a lot of these sites who have made it so user hostile to join their “communities”. Again, it’s just anecdotal, I’ve done or read no research. But I do think that it’s interesting that we’re now at a point where many people will include “Reddit” in their search queries when looking for answers, and Reddit is the easiest side in the world to join or even read without signing in (at least old.reddit is).

[mort96]

Yeah, I've noticed this too: seeing a Quora question that's exactly what I'm looking for, clicking it, and not actually finding the question which the SERP said was there. At least this used to happen back when I actually got Quora results, I'm not sure if its search ranking has dropped or if Quora results get caught by my banner blindness these days.

There are some sites which will generate a bunch of pages which show up in Google searches but which are really just site searches. You google a thing, and a site pops up with a page called "Articles about the thing", but when you go there you see it's just a site search for "the thing". I wonder if Quora is doing something similar? Maybe the question doesn't actually exist, and the page in the Google search result is just a disguised search page?

[jfengel]

For some insane reason, Quora's default view is to show you "answers to related questions".

If you click the dropdown box in the upper left, you can change from "All related" to "Answers". That should turn up the answers that the search engine was seeing.

I can generally give you at least some explanation for why Quora behaves the way it does, but I'm afraid I just toss my hands up at this one.