Question(s) about auxin.

What can we do about the fact that many questions on Quora tend to be artificial?

• A real question is the type you put into Google when you really need an answer. They are realtime questions that you want an immediate answer to. On Quora the questions seem artificial because you have a user trying to think up a question, when the need for an answer is not imminent. The brilliance of Quora is that it should fill the need in Google for answers to questions that people type as their search request eventually. But in fact there is probably a whole class of questions that will not be covered in Quora because they were not collected in real time. What is really needed it seems to me is some way for questions asked in Google to become Quora questions automatically, if they do not already exist. I have been complaining about the fact that questions on Quora are not as good as answers. But I then realized that part of the problem is that people are trying to think up a question when they use Quora, while real questions are those that arise in real time and are in desperation typed into Google. So is it possible to get all the questions typed into Google and automatically make them questions in Quora so that we can have real questions that are not artificial as well?

• Answer:

  As much as this sounds exciting and plausible, the sheer magnitude of this activity can drain Quora is what I believe. Statistics indicate that the percentage of population that has access to Internet is somewhere close to 30%. And each one of these people access google atleast once in a day. And assuming that they do search for what they want using semantic phrases, the answers that the search results are usually pathetic. With spam-generators, generating pages and pages of non-sensical SEO based data it would be meaningless to sift through the data, unless and until there is human intervention. Unfortunately Artificial Intelligence and NLP hasn't developed to such an advanced level, where machines would be able to tell the different between spammed content and genuine requested query when presented with a data set that exceeds 1 million results [for. e.g] If Quora were to do such an activity, there will have to significant resources pumping into this project, and a lot of manual intervention would be required to "train" such a system, [if one were put into place]. As much as I would love to see a system, such as the one described by you in the question, to be put in place, I am afraid that it would be quite some time before such an event occurs.