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Quora Working On Quality Algorithm

Despite -- or due to -- its rapid growth, everyone's asking how question & answer service Quora plans to scale the high quality of its content. Well, among several new projects, the startup is developing an algorithm to determine user quality, according to Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever. "The algorithm is somewhat similar to PageRank but since people are different from pages on the web and the signals that are available on Quora are different from those on the web, it's not exactly the same problem," Cheever writes in a recent post. "We'll use this to help decide what to show in feeds, when to send notifications, and how to rank answers."

According to TechCrunch, the improvement "will be a huge addition in terms of technology." In addition, Quora will increasingly rely on its community to evaluate content quality. "Most of the people who use Quora have pretty good judgement, and we believe there is some wisdom in crowds," he writes. "Preliminarily, this approach is very promising." As TechCrunch notes, better educating new and existing community members will be essential to crowdsourcing quality control.

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