Quora has become the number one place on the internet where people have a chance to ask questions around different topics and get an answer and opinions from other people around the world. By the end of 2022 there will be more than 100 millions questions asked on the site with many more answers around them.
With that many questions and answers, there are a limitless number of opportunities and user cases hidden in its data. You might want to know what people are asking around your brand, what people think of competitors’ products or you simply want to find the best ways of educating your child. There are a huge number of use cases but there are not many tools that allow to scrape Quora. In this article we are going to show you how easily you can scrape Quora using the unique ImportFromWeb tool.
Use cases for scraping Quora
Let’s say you are a marketer and you want to do market research for some of your products and find out the customers’ opinions around it. You could also want to find out how your competitor’s products are being positioned on the market too. No matter which use case have on our mind, this is the set of the most interesting data that we can get from Quora:
- The most popular questions that are asked around our topic
- The number of views for each question
- The number of answers for each question
- The number of followers for each question
Let’s say we want to find and scrape the top questions related to the “Coca cola” search query. This is what we got:
On this page we will need to open each question and find out the number of views, answers and followers for it. And if we want to have up to date data, we will need to do this on a daily or a weekly basis. Also keep in mind that we are doing this for one topic only – if we have 10, or 100 products, then this would be a full time job. That is why we are introducing ImportFromWeb as the best Quora scraper out there.
Introducing ImportFromWeb
ImportFromWeb is the one and only web scraping tool that allows you to scrape any website on the internet and export the data in a Google Sheets document. It is installed as a Google sheets add-on and provides you with a simple, easy to use and very powerful scraping function. We invite you first to discover the =IMPORTFROMWEB() function syntax.
With this function you can scrape thousands of pages in a matter of seconds and get the results in a structured document that can be easily shared with your collaborators. Using our web scraper you can also export the data in one of the supported export formats: Microsoft Excel, OpenDocument, PDF, HTML or CSV format.
How to use ImportFromWeb to scrape Quora questions
In this section we are going to show you one example of how you can scrape Quora using our ImportFromWeb Google Sheets add-on.
Scrape search query results
Back to our “Coca-cola” example, we will ask ImportFromWeb to collect the questions that are listed. We are going to use XPaths for scraping this data and collect it writing our function (refering to our XPaths finder guide):
=IMPORTFROMWEB(A12,B10:C10,"jsRendering")
in A12, we have inserted the quora search URL, and B10:C10 contains our 2 XPaths.
This is how the results looks like:
Scrape questions number of views
We can now further use the question links to get more information about each of these questions. If we scrape the question links individually we can get this information:
- Number of answers
- Number of followers
- Number of views
- All related questions list
Let’s collect for example the number of views of each question to determine for instance the popularity of each question. Again, we will use the appropriate XPath to get this data. Here’s our function:
=IMPORTFROMWEB(D12,$E$10,"jsRendering")
And here are the results:
And that’s it! With these simple steps, we have shown you how you can scrape most of the data available on Quora.
Conclusion
Throughout the years Quora has gathered one large pool of questions, interests and opinions of the people around the world. This pool contains valuable insight for pretty much any product or service out there which makes it a very useful source of information for lots of individuals and professionals around the globe.
Getting all this info manually can be quite time consuming and that is where ImportFromWeb adds a sunshine to your day by automating all these processes for you. ImportFromWeb is a simple and easy to use Google Sheets add-on that allows you to scrape all the relevant Quora information into a spreadsheet in a matter of seconds. Having the data in this format allows you to easily modify it or share it with your collaborators.
If you’re interested in getting our Quora scraper template for Google Sheets, feel free to ask us!
