Quora has your answer

If you aren’t familiar with the question and answer platform that 190 million people visit on a monthly basis, Quora is a question and answer platform that leverages smart algorithms to curate content. It was founded by Adam D’Angelo (former CTO of Facebook) and Charlie Cheever (early Facebook employee) in 2009. Over the past 8 years, it has replaced Yahoo Answers as the go-to platform for Q&A on the internet.

Quora has questions about literally everything, ranging from “What are the 10 best books you’ve ever read?” to “If Google employees were swapped with Microsoft employees, what would happen?” Since we are experts on search here at Swiftype, we’ve taken to Quora to help answer questions about site search and how to do it right. Here’s an overview of what we’ve addressed.

Topic 1 – Google is sunsetting site search

Google is sunsetting their site search by the end of 2017 and is directing users to their ad-powered site search product. This is not an acceptable replacement for businesses, so the search for a new solution is in full-swing.

There are two popular Quora questions on this topic:

Read Matt Riley's answer to Alternatives to Google Custom Search and GSS on Quora

Read Sanjana Chand's answer to Are there site-specific search services similar to Google Site Search? on Quora

Topic 2 – Site search best practices

As search has become a critical component for almost every website or app, webmasters and product builders are seeking to provide the best experience possible. Recently we answered a question on Quora about site search best practices. Since we power search for more than 500,000 websites, we thought we could provide some helpful insight.

Read Sam Reid's answer to What are the best practices for implementing an internal site search? on Quora

Topic 3 – Top site search providers

A popular type of question on Quora is “What is best solution for X?” or “What company does the best job for Y?”. This type of question can be tricky to answer as a representative of a company because answers can come across as biased. At Swiftype, we’ve taken the approach of remaining neutral. When we answer these questions, we focus on objectively highlighting our feature set and the benefits that they provide. Here’s what we had to say.

Read Sam Reid's answer to Who are the best vendors for site search technology? on Quora
Read Praveena Khatri's answer to What is the best site search to implement on a website? on Quora

What are your site search questions?

Do you have a site search question that you’d like us to answer? Post your question on Quora and then tweet at us to let us know (Our handle is @swiftype). We’re happy to share what we’ve learned about search from serving customers like Lyft, Twilio, NBC Universal, Shopify and many others.