A perplexed blogger

Quora do not want search engines to publish their content: its robots.txt blocks all indexable URLs, for instance http://www.quora.com/SEO.

User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Allow: /about/
Allow: /jobs
Allow: /challenges
Allow: /press
Allow: /login/
Disallow: /
Disallow: /log
Disallow: /*/log
Disallow: /home/global_feed

It is not a surprise that a growing upstart tries to stand alone without the tail wind that Google provides. Its very selling point to investors is the fact that its uptake of adoption by users is by the social media experience itself.

An interesting paradox of Quora is that it is a social media site posing as a search engine. Its founder believes that “more than 90% of the information people want to know is still not available on the web in a format that’s easy for them to quickly understand”.

Also common to search engines is the focus on dealing with the challenge of duplicated content. Central to Quora is its ability to merge questions to keep uniqueness of the content over time and across topics.

Since SEO is really about efficiently rotate the inventory of content in any database, a fascinating challenge for Quora itself would be to optimize content with the active contribution of its users.

David Mitchell published last Saturday that “the press can’t stray too far from the truth or its legal bills get out of control“. That would not explain the success of “newspapers” that make a fortune out of libel for years and decades. They sell crap that is tolerated just for the same reason that junk food “restaurants” are not sued for health and safety reasons.

Mitchell might miss the point that people do not care anymore about what is printed, but about getting its morality massaged and relaxed by satisfying a few needs of the higher layers of Maslow’s hierarchy:

• the need to be stirred by in-your-face provocateurs like benefit cheaters, bankers or over paid footballers. If their attitudes are offensive enough, one’s intimate convictions get reinforced by their insult
• the need to be moved by honorable members of the society like relatives of soldiers in Afganistan so that you identify with the group that share your own values
• the need to get aroused by impossibly beautiful women (or men) posing sexy and receptive
• the need to be impressed by successful celebrities in the politics, sports, business and fashion worlds so that the reader’s confidence in mainstream role models and leaders gets reassured and reinforced

It is not easy being a Spaniard in London these days. Friends, acquaintances, neighbours, everyone congratulate “you” for the victory in the World Cup. I was introduced to someone who, when finding out that I am from Spain simply declared that “Spanish win everything”.

Someone said that the Spanish players played dirty too because they also got a few yellow cards but in general the consensus is that the Dutch almost spoiled the game if it were not for the quality of the Spaniards.