Got questions? Quora knows all (sort of).

What's the meaning of life?

"There's no meaning of life. You have about 85 years to make thebest of it."

Okay, so the Internet might not solve your existential crisis.But it will provide almost instant answers to just about anyquestion you could have. (The one above comes from Yahoo! Answers.)

And yet sorting through the clutter of sites to find the rightanswer often means making do with "good enough." That's because thesources are usually indiscernible or non-expert.

Into this cacophony has come a question-and-answer Web site thathas the potential to do all the others one better. Launched lastyear by two former Facebook developers and now expanding rapidly,Quora is simple to use. Log on with a Facebook or Twitter accountand ask or answer a question. The questions are tagged by topics, sopeople can search for information based on their interest areas.Looking for cooking tips? There's a topic for that. Narrow it downto "barbecue" and you'll find recipes for the best barbecue sauce, arecommendation for the greatest barbecue restaurant in Kansas City,Kan. (Oklahoma Joe's, if you're curious) and a question aboutcarcinogens in smoked foods.

Sure, you can find these answers in a lot of places. Ask.com willgive you a list of restaurants in Kansas City. Twitter users canoffer their suggestions for good sauces. Head over to WebMD forcancer studies linked to smoked foods.

But on Quora, accounts are linked to users' identities via theirsocial networking sites and answers are more apt to come from peoplewho actually know something. They provide theircredentials and you decide whether to trust what they say. Usersrate the best answers.

The cancer and smoked-foods link? Answered by a surgeon at theUniversity of California at Davis. Need tips on good books forchildren? A librarian and a schoolteacher weigh in. Want to know howmuch AOL spent on mailing compact discs in the '90s so people couldsign up? Five AOL executives, including co-founder Steve Case,answered that question (about $300 million).

And rather than quick replies - on Twitter, limited to 140characters - Quora allows for deeper, long-form answers, which meansit can sometimes feel like a graduate school philosophy class, asone user called it.

There's a collective attempt to get at both factual andmetaphysical truths. A user asked, "What's it feel like to bestupid?" The answer, one of the most recommended on the site, camefrom a user whose heart disease maimed his ability to think. "Aftera year or so I am almost as 'clever' as I used to be, although Itend to ignore distractions more than I used to and focus on asmaller number of projects," the writer said. "I'm still more laidback than I used to be, though, and have more patience with people."His insight elevated the conversation far above a simple questionand answer.

Quora was dubbed a promising start-up by tech blogs early on, butit didn't draw much attention until December, when the site'straffic began growing exponentially - doubling in one week, againthe following week and yet again in the first week of January. Theprivate company is not releasing numbers, but users answering aquestion on the site estimated about half a million people havesigned up so far.

These new members clearly see something to like in Quora, but thesite still has more potential than track record. Like Twitter, itcould become overrun by journalists, marketing gurus andimagemakers. It, too, could grow noisy. And of course, in theperpetually innovating world of the Internet, there is never a finalanswer.

bellm@washpost.com