About Cognify

Why I Built This

I have always loved trivia but never found online quizzes that quite satisfied me. Most are too simple, cover only a single topic, demand your email to show results, or rely entirely on multiple choice. I wanted something better — a quiz that covers real depth across many fields, respects your time, and actually challenges you. That became Cognify.

How It Works

Answer Matching

Since there is no multiple choice, you type your answers freely. Cognify uses fuzzy matching that tolerates spelling mistakes, especially for longer answers — “Shakespear” or “Sravinsky” would still be accepted. Many questions accept multiple phrasings: both “Mozart” and “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart”, or “Iron”, “Fe”, and “Ferrum”. Very short answers (three characters or fewer) require an exact match, since a single wrong character likely means a different answer. Numeric questions accept a reasonable range rather than an exact value.

Adaptive Difficulty

The quiz starts with a pair of easy questions. If you get them right, it skips ahead to harder material. If you struggle, it confirms and moves on. It keeps probing with pairs, moving up when you do well and stepping back when you don't, until it finds the boundary of your knowledge — roughly where you start getting about half wrong.

Each difficulty level maps to a score range: Easy is 1–25, Medium is 26–50, and Hard is 51–100. Strong users who ace Hard get additional questions to distinguish an 80 from a 99. Most topics resolve in 5–9 questions rather than the 15–20 a fixed-length test would need.

The three difficulty levels are calibrated as follows:

• Easy — Common knowledge most adults would know
• Medium — Requires a reasonable education or modest interest in the topic
• Hard — Requires genuine domain knowledge, study, or a professional background

The Questions

Cognify contains over 6,000 questions across 12 categories. The initial question set was generated with the help of AI, but every question that appears in the quiz has been individually reviewed and curated.

Honestly assessing question quality across this many fields is hard — I do not have expert knowledge in most of them. To compensate, each question is cross-checked using Claude, Gemini, and where needed Wikipedia, to verify factual accuracy, answer correctness, and appropriate difficulty assignment.

Despite this effort, outliers will exist. The system tracks how each question performs — correct rates and difficulty mismatches — so that questions that are too hard, too easy, or otherwise problematic will surface over time and get adjusted. Subcategory-level statistics are also monitored to keep difficulty balanced across topics.

You can help by reporting questions. If something feels wrong, unfair, or ambiguous, the report button is there for exactly that reason. Reports with specific feedback — “the accepted answer should also include X” or “this question is ambiguous because Y” — are especially valuable and will be reviewed.

Cognify currently only supports English, which means the quiz unavoidably tests language proficiency alongside subject knowledge — something I am aware of as a non-native English speaker myself. Adding more languages is planned to make the experience fairer.

Taking a test on Cognify should be fun, not frustrating.

I hope you enjoy trying Cognify!

If you have any feedback you are welcome to reach out at feedback@cognify.now — thank you!