Quora Questions & Answers Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

Quora hosts millions of publicly viewable question-and-answer threads across every topic imaginable, but there's no official export or API for pulling that content into your own dataset. This Actor takes Quora question URLs, topic URLs, or search keywords and returns structured rows: question text, topic tags, and answer bodies with author, upvote count, and post date. Content gated behind Quora's 'Continue Reading' or login wall is flagged, never bypassed — this is public-page-only, read-only scraping. Core Features: multi-seed input (question URLs, topic URLs, or keywords), per-question fault isolation, and typed dataset rows.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so Quora sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Proxy session rotation via Apify Proxy, with the exit country pinned to your proxyCountryCode on every session.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Managed-challenge detection — a Cloudflare challenge page rotates the browser fingerprint and proxy session instead of being parsed as content.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable question/answer IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for rows that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• SEO / content-gap research — pull real Quora questions and top answers in your niche to find topics your own content doesn't cover yet.
• AI-answer-quality corpus building — collect real question/answer pairs with upvote signal as training or eval data for LLM answer-quality work.
• Community sentiment tracking — monitor how a topic's top answers change over time as new responses get upvoted.
• Competitive research — see which questions in your industry get the most engagement and who's answering them.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
questionUrls	array	no	['https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-Python']	Direct Quora question page URLs, e.g. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-Python. One of Question URLs…
topicUrls	array	no	'—'	Quora topic page URLs, e.g. https://www.quora.com/topic/Python-programming-language. Linked question URLs are…
searchKeywords	array	no	'—'	Keywords seeded into Quora's public search. Best-effort — degrades to zero rows if Quora's search results are…
maxQuestions	integer	no	50	Cap on distinct questions processed per run, across all seeds combined.
maxAnswersPerQuestion	integer	no	10	Cap on answer rows per question in 'Full answers' content mode. Ignored in 'Question metadata' mode.
contentMode	string	no	'full_answers'	'Full answers' emits one row per answer. 'Question metadata' emits one row per question with no answer-body fetch.
proxyCountryCode	string	no	'US'	ISO-3166-1 alpha-2 country code pinned on every proxy session, e.g. US.
runTimeoutSeconds	integer	no	1200	Wall-clock budget. Discovery and processing stop past this and in-flight rows are flushed.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True}	Apify Proxy configuration. FREE-tier auto-select by default — this Actor does not require RESIDENTIAL by default.

Example input

{
  "questionUrls": [
    "https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-Python"
  ],
  "maxAnswersPerQuestion": 3,
  "contentMode": "full_answers",
  "proxyCountryCode": "US",
  "runTimeoutSeconds": 300,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
question_id	string	Id/slug parsed from the question URL.
question_text	string	Question text — page H1 / schema.org Question.name.
question_url	string	Canonical Quora question URL.
question_topics	array	Topic breadcrumb/tag links attached to the question. May be empty.
question_answer_count	['integer', 'null']	Total answer count, when exposed by the page.
answer_id	['string', 'null']	Anchor id from the answer permalink. Null in question_metadata mode.
answer_text	['string', 'null']	Rendered answer body, public view only.
answer_is_truncated	['boolean', 'null']	True when the visible body ends in a 'Continue Reading' gate.
answer_author_name	['string', 'null']	Display name on the answer byline.
answer_author_handle	['string', 'null']	Profile slug from the byline link.
answer_upvotes	['integer', 'null']	Upvote count, when server-rendered.
answer_posted_at	['string', 'null']	ISO-8601 if absolute, else the raw relative string as scraped.
answer_url	['string', 'null']	question_url plus the #answer-id fragment.
content_mode	string	Echoes the run's contentMode input — 'full_answers' or 'question_metadata'.
source_seed	string	The seed (question URL, topic URL, or keyword) that discovered this row.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 scrape-time timestamp — not page data.

Example output

{
  "question_id": "What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-Python",
  "question_text": "What is the best way to learn Python?",
  "question_url": "https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-Python",
  "question_topics": [
    "Python (programming language)",
    "Programming Languages"
  ],
  "question_answer_count": 214,
  "answer_id": "answer-123456789",
  "answer_text": "Start with a small project instead of a course...",
  "answer_is_truncated": false,
  "answer_author_name": "Jane Doe",
  "answer_author_handle": "jane-doe-42",
  "answer_upvotes": 318,
  "answer_posted_at": "Updated 3d ago",
  "answer_url": "https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-Python#answer-123456789",
  "content_mode": "full_answers",
  "source_seed": "https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-Python",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-11T12:00:00Z"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-scraped	$0.002	Per unique dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $2.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

Public-page-only: no login, no authenticated cookies, no session-gated content. Content behind Quora's 'Continue Reading' or login wall is flagged via answer_is_truncated, never authenticated for. No comment-thread scraping, no user-profile scraping beyond the byline name/handle, no Quora Spaces / Quora+ paywalled content, no write actions (voting, following, posting), and no sentiment analysis or LLM post-processing — raw text only.

❓ FAQ

Does this scrape content behind Quora's login wall?

No. This Actor is public-page-only — it never authenticates. Answers gated behind a 'Continue Reading' prompt are returned with the visible text and answer_is_truncated: true; the gated remainder is never fetched.

Do I need a Quora account or API key?

No. Just supply Question URLs, Topic URLs, or Search keywords — no login, no API key, no Quora+ subscription.

Are search keywords as reliable as question or topic URLs?

Search keywords are best-effort — Quora's search results can be client-rendered, in which case that seed returns zero rows (logged, not an error) while the run continues. Question URLs and Topic URLs are the reliable primary seed types.

What happens if a question was deleted or the page fails to load?

That question is logged and skipped — one bad question never aborts the run. If every seed fails, the run exits with a clear status message instead of returning an empty dataset with a green status.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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