Question from Michael E.: I recently started answering questions on Quora to drive traffic to my blog, and I’m really happy with the amount of visitors it’s sending me so far.
I’ve noticed that when I’m the first person to answer a question my answer will often remain at the top after other people add their answers. That’s why I prefer answering questions that haven’t been answered yet.
Do you know of a way to get Quora to display just the questions that haven’t been answered yet?
Rick’s answer: I’m glad you’ve started using Quora, Michael. In addition to being a great place to get answers to your own questions, it’s a fantastic source of relevant blog traffic as well!
To answer your question, Quora doesn’t seem to offer a way to view nothing but unanswered questions. Well, if it does I haven’t been able to find it.
I have discovered a work-around using Google, however. Just follow the steps below:
1 – Open your web browser and log into your Quora account.
2 – Visit Google and type (or copy & paste) the following into the Search box:
site:quora.com inurl:quora.com/unanswered
You should now see a long list of unanswered questions from the Quora website.
Note: You can narrow down the list of unanswered questions by adding any search term to the end of the query. For example, if you wanted to see a list of unanswered questions about Facebook you could type this into the Search box:
site:quora.com inurl:quora.com/unanswered facebook
You should now see a list of unanswered questions on Quora that at least contain the word Facebook.
3 – Ctrl-click on a question that interests you and Quora will open in a new tab with that question already open. From there you can choose whether to answer it or not.
4 – After you’re finished with that question you can close that tab and you’ll be right back at the list of questions again. From there you can choose your next question.
That’s all there is to it. I’ll admit that this method is a little clunky, but it works.
Now I must mention a couple of caveats:
1 – Since you’re getting the list of unanswered questions from Google instead of directly from Quora you won’t see questions that were asked within the last few minutes. However, Google indexes Quora pages very quickly so the ones you see should still be quite recent.
2 – I’ve found that occasionally a question that has already been answered will filter through and show up in the list, but they are usually few and far between.
Note: If anyone has found a better way to display only unanswered Quora questions I’d love to know about it. Simply post it in a comment below, and if it works well I’ll add it to this post and give you the credit for finding it!
I hope this helps, Michael. Good luck!
Update from Michael: Thanks Rick. Like you said, it’s a little clunky, but it works. And that’s all that matters. I appreciate your help!
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