This month, the company is announcing a feature that will allow users to leave structured reviews (with a one star to five star rating), adding structure to the traditional feedback people leave on the Q&A site for products like books, TV shows, cars, or tech hardware.

In the past eight months we’ve seen the company launch embeddable threads, an Android app, designated power user status, an “online now” feature, a blogging platform, and a rich text editor for mobile, to name a few. The company took an significant $50 million in venture funding last May, and is clearly under a good deal of pressure to prove traction and adoption (landing it in hot water last month as a result). So embracing a product-driven approach to growth is understandable.

As with all of the company’s updates, the new review features attempts to highlight the quality the company is known for generating in its question and answer pages. Reviews would certainly make the site more even more SEO-friendly by surfacing reviews for popular shows like House of Cards when someone is Googling for information about the show. So it’s a natural progression for the company, although a review feature certainly isn’t unique to Quora.

“I think the biggest benefit is that it provides structure and categorization to this type of knowledge,” said Quora’s Marc Bodnick, who handles marketing for the company. He emphasized that Quora is not as interested in encouraging reviews of local businesses or restaurants, as sites like Yelp have a strong hold on that type of content. “The big reason why we’re excited to launch his product is to signal to readers and writers that there’s one place to write this type of question. So we’re hoping that if users think to themselves that if they want to write something about House of Cards, there will be a place to do that.”

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Google’s search algorithms are excellent at surfacing relevant content for basic keyword style head queries, but when we search for something specific using a long tail query, the answers aren’t consistently relevant. I would submit that this isn’t so much an issue with Google’s search algorithm as it is a content problem; that is, a large number of content sources that attempt to service long tail queries simply do a poor job of it. For Google to improve its search relevance for long tail queries – which it must, as those continue to become a huge chunk of its searches – it should integrate a high-quality QnA service like Quora with its search.

Google’s long tail problem

To better understand the differences between the two types of search, and the dilemma Google now faces, do a quick search using any or all of the following, pretty straightforward long tail queries and check the quality of search results:

“diet plan for diabetics and high blood pressure”
“how to get rid of acne”
“what do turtles eat as pets”
“how to train your parrot to talk”
“important things to consider before purchasing a house”

You will quickly discover that the results are mostly identical or slightly rehashed versions of other articles scraped from multiple sites across the web, many of them originating from content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content. Those sources are among many that specialize in trying to corner the market on servicing long tail queries. However they all suffer from two major problems:

Poor quality The army of low-paid freelancers who manufacture the “content” for these sites get paid essentially by volume. They are almost never experts in a given topic (or even passingly familiar, one could argue). They simply crank out 500-word article as quickly as possible so that these networks can embed three adsense ads in between and then move on to the next topic.

Bias toward popular keywords Despite intending to service long tail queries, in fact many of these services tend to produce content around keywords that are popular enough that they can reliably generate advertising revenue.

A source of reliable long tail query content

Clearly there is a demand for reliable long tail query content queries. Now consider a practical one like “how to get a passport faster,” and how massively helpful it would be to get the answer from a person who has actually gone through the process, rather than the person who designed the process. Wouldn’t it be logical for Google to implement a source of content that is produced by generally passionate, informed people –  a source like Quora?

Unlike Wikipedia, which is best at answering head queries, Quora is all about long tail. So integrating Quora with search would provide Google’s users more reliable and useful results for long tail queries. It would also contribute to a virtuous cycle by allowing users to help produce reliable content, too, as searches prompt further contextual content that may need answering. This will help Google get knowledge from content sources (such as those who contribute to Wikipedia) who do not own a website but have valuable knowledge.

Here’s a rough mockup of a Google search results page for the long tail query “diet plan for hypertension and diabetes” but with Quora integrated:

As another example, for a more task-based query like “how to file taxes,” you might also end up with relevant contextual content in the right pane of the search results:

• How do I calculate taxes?
• What is the last date to file taxes?
• What are the tax changes for 2013?
• What are the important things I should know before I file my taxes?
• What is the best software to file taxes?

Integrating Quora will enable Google to serve far more relevant answers for a much broader range of queries even though a smaller percentage of people will be actively producing the content. And it’s worth noting that in the process, Google will be effectively replacing dollars other networks pay to content churners with upvotes and follows to passionate users instead (talk about virtuous cycles!).

This is social search, where content will be produced in the context of social, but consumed in the context of search.

Narendra Reddy is chief product officer for the educational software developer Wignite. Follow him on Twitter @naren.

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The issue came up Wednesday evening when engineer and former professor Scott Hanselman wrote a post titled, “I’d like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora.” The post pointed out that the company has started redirecting mobile users who end up on Quora webpages to download the company’s mobile app before reading answers.

And indeed, it’s an incredibly annoying tactic. Search for any topic (like, “best Star Wars movie“) and include “Quora” in the query, and try to read the resulting page on your mobile device. You can’t. The page tells you to download the app to read further, and will only let you see the first answer until you do so. On desktop, you’re asked to create an account and log in before reading. Not such a great user experience.

And then Y Combinator founder and startup legend Paul Graham weighed in on Hacker News, writing that Quora co-founder and ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo is trying too hard to gain new users the way he learned at Facebook, not understanding that Quora users are a different breed. He argued against the company’s policy of making users create accounts to read answers and comment on the site:

It may be a mistake to alienate the sort of people Quora has been alienating by doing this, even if they end up numerically ahead in the short term. I’m one of them. Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site.

Quora hasn’t responded with any comment yet as to how long the “download the app” screen has been in place, or why they require users to make accounts. But it’s not too hard to see why they’re doing this: the company has raised a lot of funding ($50 million just this past summer), and it needs to see growth. While it saw early success from its high quality questions and answers on the site, it can’t become a profitable business with just a handful of readers.

A similar thing happened last summer with Twitter and its developers over API restrictions. It happened in December with Instagram and its terms of service debacle after joining up with Facebook. And now, Quora is in the limelight.

“We want to get to be 100 times bigger than we are today,” D’Angelo told Om in a January interview. So how does the company get there?

Quora has tried a lot of different tactics in its quest for growth in the past year: adding a standalone blogging platform, rewarding users who write the best and most plentiful answers, letting people embed quotes across the web, and adding an Android app.

So getting people to download the company’s app and requiring account? Not too surprising. But at some point, Quora needs to make sure that it strikes the best balance possible between demanding investors and loyal users.

Update at 10:36 PM: Quora has released a blog post explaining the rationale behind asking users to log into the site before viewing answers on desktop, explaining that logging in and participating in the discussion is a key component of the Quora product and helps keep the quality of discussion high.

However, the company wrote that it will be changing how posts can be shared, allowing users to share out Quora content to social network users who will be able to read without logging in. The full post and explanation can be found online here.

Quora business executive Marc Bodnick also provided GigaOM a statement regarding mobile viewership, explaining why Quora readers are prompted to download the company’s native apps to read:

“We’ve worked hard to create the best mobile experience with our Android and iOS apps, and we encourage users to download them for the optimal mobile experience. We are always listening to the feedback of our community, and will continue to iterate the way that we help people discover the best Quora experience on any device.”

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Content farms appeared on the scene several years ago, as publishers tried to figure out how to drive search traffic to their websites, since Google had become one of the top traffic sources in the industry. As SEO or search-engine optimization became a crucial part of the business, some took this principle to its logical conclusion and started creating content specifically to attract Google and profit from advertising keywords (Note: We’re going to be talking about alternative methods of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in April).

Content farms had an explicitly financial motive

One of the most prominent players was Demand Media, which owned eHow, an early attempt at SEO for content. The model was simple: pay a large stable of freelance writers very small amounts of money (often as little as $2 per article) to create or aggregate “service oriented” content around specific ad-heavy topics. This version of the business was more or less killed by Google via updates to its search algorithm, which pushed low-quality content further down in search results.

Walk argues that Medium and Quora’s new blogging platform (which converted what were message boards into individual blogs) as well as the blog network Svbtle and LinkedIn’s Influencer program share many of the same features as early content farms. Among other things, he says they offer:

• Article-based construction: In other words, a blog-style layout and format with multiple, dated posts written by an individual author
• Cross-promotion: Visitors come to one blog post and are shown others by the same author or different authors to try and entice them to stay
• Easy to use publishing tools: Medium and some other players offer lightweight content-creation features that make it easy to write and publish

For me at least, the main difference between what Medium and Svbtle and Quora seem to be doing and what “content farms” did is the lack of an obvious financial motive. True content farms were designed to maximize the search traffic so that they could generate advertising revenue (at one point, 30 percent of Demand Media’s revenue came from Google ads). But Svbtle and Medium, for example, don’t have advertising of any kind — although of course it’s possible that they could decide to turn on ads at some later date, once their traffic numbers justify it.

The rise of content farms for good?

Even Walk says that he sees these new platforms as “content farms for good,” meaning they are mostly focused on curation of quality content, which is why I think it’s better to think of them as curation engines rather than farms — or perhaps as “artisanal” content producers, to use a popular term. Both Svbtle and Medium are clearly putting a lot of emphasis on selecting quality contributors, since both are invitation-only, and LinkedIn seems to take this approach as well (Quora is much more open, in part because it converted its existing message boards).

LinkedIn clearly has an interest in driving traffic to its site with its Influencer content, in the hope that readers of those articles might decide to stick around or visit more often, and make use of the other things that actually produce revenue for the company. But in that sense, its program is more like what some call “content marketing,” which uses content that isn’t directly monetized as a way of promoting a brand or an advertiser’s main business.

In the end, all these platforms seem to be designed to appeal to writers who may have thoughts to contribute, but don’t necessarily want to maintain their own blog. Making that easy, and curating the results so that they are of high quality, may ultimately be a way around Google’s content-farm algorithms, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if higher-quality content is what gets produced. In that sense at least, Google’s efforts seem to be working.

Images courtesy of Flickr user D. Miller and Shutterstock / Gl0ck

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“We’re not going to be a place for cat photos,” said Marc Bodnick, a product and business executive at Quora who explained the product in an interview Wednesday. “We’re not a site for light, viral, multimedia-sharing without text. We’re a site where people share ideas and thoughts. So the same type of people who write answers are going to be the same types of people who write on blogs.”

The move toward blogging represents a shift for Quora, which has so far been entirely about questions and answers that users could upvote and follow. But the site, which was launched by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo in 2010, has always been about providing high-quality information to a dedicated group of readers, and in this sense the addition of blogging makes sense. Not to mention that blogging could attract a larger audience to Quora than questions and answers that require a login, setting itself up for greater advertising opportunities than it would have otherwise.

D’Angelo sat down with GigaOM earlier this month where he explained where the company is headed:

“We think at a very high level there is a lot of knowledge that is inside people’s head and is not accessible. Sure, the internet (of today) is pretty vast and big, but it is still not where we can access that knowledge that easily. So you have a blog, but a lot of people don’t have an audience or aren’t as connected and able to find the information as you. Access to that knowledge is much harder, and our goal is to make it easy. Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it.”

Quora executives are pushing the idea that through the new blogging platform, anyone with a good idea and smart writing can become famous on the site, even if that person doesn’t have a strong Twitter following or an existing popular blog of their own.

“You can write an answer that goes viral on the site despite no one following you,” Bodnick said.

And to a certain extent, this is true — there are indviduals, like the guy who wrote about his car breaking down in front of Steve Job’s house, who have become “Quora famous,” to an extent. Bodnick noted that some of the service’s “top writers“ get 30,000 views on a post per month, and some of the very top writers get up to 100,000.

But Quora attracts a very specific readership in a few key areas, like movies, technology, or startups, and the people who have built a dedicated Quora following seem more poised for Quora blogging success than entirely new users who write about topics that are less popular. If you’re blogging about Steve Jobs and post your writing under the Steve Jobs topic, which has thousands of existing followers, you could do well. But it seems fairly topic-specific, and hardly a guarantee of publishing fame.

There are also so many blogging platforms out there, from WordPress to Tumblr to Medium to Branch to LinkedIn, it’s hard to think how Quora’s new tools presents much for the average blogger — they seem likely to excite people who are already consistent Quora posters. But for those users, the platform could allow them to expand on ideas that aren’t posed as answers to questions, and a new rich text editor for mobile released in a few weeks will add to that experience as well.

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Despite the disagreements, just before the holidays kicked in, D’Angelo met with me in his Palo Alto offices, which house about 50 employees. Those who know him call him shy and quiet. And so I didn’t know what was in store for me. We ended up having a discussion that lasted about 45 minutes. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Om: Adam, I have to say, the weekly email newsletter you guys send out is pretty damn good and enjoyable and worth reading. Especially compared to the horrible emails I get from other services. How do you guys do it?

Adam: Well, it is algorithmically created. I wanted to make something that people would read. What I didn’t want was something that was an annoying little email. It took awhile, but it has paid off. We had two people who worked on it (in a dedicated fashion) for a month, though we had been working on-and-off on it for nearly a year and a half. The email essentially looks at what people are reading and engaging (with) the most on Quora.

Om: What prompted you to start this particular company?

Adam: I really like knowledge and reading books and just generally immersing myself in information. I felt that if we could organize that, there was a huge potential and it was good for the world. I didn’t think there was something that was very good at organizing knowledge. Also, it is hard to displace companies with massive user base. For example, Facebook trying to displace Twitter. I think after a certain point it becomes really hard. I think if you look, a lot of the knowledge is decentralized and we wanted to build a core place oriented to knowledge.

Om: You recently raised $50 million and were individually a big investor in the round. Since you are putting your own money into the company, what is the plan for Quora and why are you so confident in the company?

Adam: We think at a very high level there is a lot of knowledge that is inside people’s head and is not accessible. Sure, the internet (of today) is pretty vast and big, but it is still not where we can access that knowledge that easily. So you have a blog, but a lot of people don’t have an audience or aren’t as connected and able to find the information as you.

Access to that knowledge is much harder, and our goal is to make it easy. Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it. And at the same time, give people a platform that is easy to use for sharing the knowledge. When you think, we are now scaling up, and a bigger set of the world’s knowledge will be on Quora and it will be more valuable. Clearly, quality is a challenge and how to keep the noise level down is going to be focus for us.

Om: You see whole series of services cropping up like Skillshare, Coursera, Udacity that are helping experts become micro-businesses. You think Quora would do this in the future?

Adam: The real reward is in the response to your answer and the fact that millions can read it. You already see more people giving and sharing knowledge for free. Lawyers and other professionals are using Quora to build their reputation and build their bonafides.

I am not sure if Quora should be in the middle trying to capitalize on it. For now our focus is on growth and getting as many people sharing and attracting as many people to the platform. We don’t know what our model is going to be — it could be advertising, pay to access and/or consult-an-expert model. We are going to try many things. But it is not the focus now.

Om: Do you see a problem with search and the internet?

Adam: Reputation is going to be a lot more important in the future especially as the internet gets bigger. It is clear that the web pages will have to get their quality up. I think there is too much focus on what is first, what is new. It has to be about what is actually worth reading that is going to become important.

I think as more people use the phones to access the internet, they have a lot less patience for trying to find things on the search engines. That is because you need to figure a lot of things out for search to work. In the past, when the web site was fast and didn’t crash, it was a pretty big deal. Now it is normal. Similarly, we will see the focus shift to quality and right information (and not the latest.) And that is why I think sharing of knowledge is going to be a lot more important in the future.

Om: Today, if broadands speeds are 10 Mbps, five years from now, they will be a gigabit per second. So what does Quora look like then? Is it still textual or is it visual, i.e. video?

Adam: There is a lot of value in text. Why? You can’t sift through a video quickly, but you can skim through text really fast. So from the aspect of knowledge, the increase in bandwidth doesn’t really change much for us.

More people on broadband will actually have more of an impact on the future. So for me, when the developing world is getting on the internet with everyone on the net at 10 Mbps — that is going to have more of an impact on Quora and the web. Ten times the people means 10 times the opportunity to share knowledge.

Om: What is the metric of success for Quora?

Adam: The real use of Quora is determined by users and the content and the topics — those are the metrics we look at.  There are not that many ideas for internet products that will be really good. It is really all about execution. Facebook too wasn’t a new idea but I think we took the idea and we focused on execution, focused on quality and getting to scale. Similarly for Quora, we want to get to be 100 times bigger than we are today.

Om: You were at FB in the early, go-go period to the adult days, and now you’re Quora’s founder and CEO. How’s that different?

Adam: We are a technology company with a focus on engineering and product. So in that sense what I do is pretty much the same. The biggest difference is that I do a lot more things these days  — working with engineers, product, data science, recruitment, and a whole lot of other things.

At Facebook, it was very familiar as I worked with people with a similar type of expertise. At Quora I have to manage different kinds of people. I have had to pick up a lot of different skills and I have had to get better at dealing with different kinds of people. I have had to learn finance, learn fundraising, and at Facebook, while I knew those things, I wasn’t ultimately responsible.

Om: Have you had to change as an individual?

Adam: At Quora, I wrote code for the first year, and then I had to stop. So now, it is more like once in awhile. I don’t have time. I feel selfish when I do write code, because people are waiting for me to make decisions on other things that I am delaying. At Facebook, too, I went from coding to management.

You have to get comfortable giving up control,  and you find people who do things better than you do. Quora now does better with the team we have built. My thoughts and time are spent entirely on recruiting and what’s on my mind is the number of good people we can hire. I spend a lot of time in schools recruiting, and it is a highly competitive market place. We do have a higher closing rate. Given that we are growing very quickly, it is still a challenge.

Om: What did you learn at Facebook?

Adam: Focus on the long term, and always do what’s right to grow the company and not make short-term decisions. And outlast everyone one.

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“It helps you satisfy your curiosity quickly and settles answers of what’s on your mind,” said Marc Bodnick, Quora’s product and business executive. “And it’s really important in the mobile world, because often the questions you want to know, you want to know soon or right now.”

The company explained how the “online now” feature works in a blog post on its site:

Online Now shows you when people with knowledge about your question are online and available to answer, and shows others when you are available to answer. Ask to Answer suggestions identify people who are likely to provide a good answer because they have answered similar questions in the past. Starting today, if one or more of these people are active on Quora now, you’ll see an Online Now label and a blue button prompting you to ask the person to answer your question.

Users who don’t want to be targeted with questions can turn off the “online now” feature in their settings, an option the company should be sensitive toward after it received backlash for showing which questions people were reading and viewing earlier this year.

The company has been making moves recently to keep users engaged on the site and spreading Quora posts across the web, marking Quora power users as “top users” to recognize their contributions, rolling out Android apps for its many new mobile users, allowing bloggers to more easily embed content across the web, and trying to show which posts have been read by users. The company has plenty of cash while it works on its business model, having recently raised $50 million in May, but presumably keeping users engaging with the site is key to success.

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Qian Jin of Nanjing, China, has applied to register marks like Foursquare, Twitter, Quora and Instagram and has also bought dozens of websites like Pinterests.com and Pinterest.de

Qian’s activities are described in a lawsuit filed by Pinterest last week in San Francisco. In its complaint, the popular image site says the defendant is a “serial cyber-squatter who has registered and owns hundreds of infringing domain names.” The company points to Qian’s “Pinterests.com“, a site that uses red-lettering similar to Pinterest but that appears to be just a dumping ground for advertisements.

While this type of cyber-squatting has been around for years, the Chinese efforts stand out because they appear to systematically target up-and-coming internet firms, and because of the trademark applications.

While firms like Pinterest can challenge the trademark filings in the US if they are not in good faith, the situation in China is murkier. Increasingly, Chinese firms are obtaining questionable trademarks and successfully asserting them against companies like Apple. Peter Toren, a former prosecutor and Washington intellectual property lawyer, has previously described some of the cases against Apple as “a stick-up.“

Pinterest is asking the San Francisco court for damages and for an order barring Qian Jin or his associates from using its name. The company also wants the court to instruct the US Patent and Trademark Office to refuse the applications for “Pinterest” and “Pinterests.”

Here are some of the other names Pinterest is trying to reclaim, followed by a copy of its court complaint:

Pinterest Complaint

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We launched Views a couple weeks ago to offer a new way of discovering content on Quora and to let writers get a sense of who they can reach through Quora. While many were really interested in these new stories, we also got a lot of feedback that people weren’t comfortable having what they viewed shared broadly with people following them. So we’re going to stop showing stories in feed about what people are viewing.

Om Malik wrote for GigaOM on the troubling aspects of the “Views” feature, which was launched August 1 and showed when a user had seen a particular post:

This is no different than the passive sharing that has been promoted by Facebook or Path. Now on a closed network like Path, which is based entirely on intimate relationships, I can understand passive sharing. After all, if you have seen my photo or a check-in and I know that, it is okay because you are on my approved list. However, the kind of sharing Quora is promoting doesn’t jive with me.

Under the new “Views,” users did have the option to turn off this feature, and it only tracked topics they were following, not those found through search. But it seems general dislike of the new feature resonated with Quora. In the blog post, Quora explained that it would continue to track “views from feed, topic pages you follow and clicks on digest emails,” but not display in the main feed which posts were read by individual users.

This post was updated at 6:55 p.m. to clarify where Quora will stop showing stories about what users are reading.

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However, the kind of sharing Quora is promoting doesn’t jive with me. And neither does it sit well with author Jeff Jarvis, who despite years of advocacy about the benefits of living in public isn’t a fan of this view feature.

I'm Mr. Public but I don't like Quora sharing who reads what. Shouldn't it operate as a library? No crime in lurking. allthingsd.com/20120801/quora…—
Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) August 01, 2012

While it is understandable for social services to use passive sharing — after all, it quantifies the act of content creation and/or content sharing –but I do feel that anonymous reading has its value.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick tells AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes:

“People on Quora are writing to be read. What we’re telling you is that Quora is a distribution mechanism that works.”

Like many others on the Internet, I too get lured into clicking headlines that are intriguing only to find myself on a list or a news item that only infuriates me. So to see my name associated with that page is disingenuous. Also, if I spent two seconds on a page, does it really count as a “view?”

Liz, who has written about the death of online lurking, wrote in a post last month:

“Passive becomes active. Lean back becomes lean forward. Stalking becomes, well, showing you’re interested in someone.”

In other words, the so-called Quora view that is generated is a false endorsement. What if I have landed on the the post accidentally or have been lured there?  I see this is a curse of Facebook, which has propagated the positive bias syndrome on the web thanks to its Like button. It is not surprising — Quora was started by ex-Facebookers, who like the social-giant itself don’t seem to put real human context around the data signals. (It is not the only bad behavior they have carried over from Facebook.)

How to get rid of Views: Click on your profile icon (top right hand corner) and hit settings in the drop down menu. Find Views (just above Deactivate option) in the right hand column. Click and chose no. Views are turned off.

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