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December 13, 2007

Google Preparing To Launch Game Changing Wikipedia Meets Squidoo Project

Duncan Riley

80 comments »

When it comes to Google, nothing should surprise us any more. Last month it was Digg style social voting on search results, this month its a new project called “Knol” (which apparently stands for a unit of knowledge), a user generated knowledge project that combines parts of Wikipedia and Squidoo (and to a lesser extent Mahalo) into what could easily turn out to game changer in this space.

The idea behind Knol is “to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.” A knol on a particular topic is “meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.” Google essentially is the conduit for user generated authoritative content, Google provides the tools (editing tools, space etc) and you contribute the content. Then we get into Squidoo territory as writers will own pages (”The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors”) and the trump card: Google will offer a revenue share of ads displayed against the content.

Duplication could become an issue however, with Google saying that they will not serve as an editor in any way, and “will not bless any content.” To quote Google:

All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

It would appear that Knol’s will appear in Google search results, but which ones appear would be based upon peer review, which pages able to be voted up and comments left.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

I’m sure they’re excited, once again they could change an entire market space. Screen shot as below and full details on the Google Blog here.

knol.jpg

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Comments

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  1. Jonathan

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:27 pm

    Google must be stopped!

  2. Andrew

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    “We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase (our total revenue) the dissemination of knowledge.”

  3. Norm

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    ha, I commented just minutes before this post went up about knol on the recent post about Google Answers, should have just waited a minute :)

  4. Thomas

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:34 pm

    Bye-bye Wikipedia.

  5. Kelli

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:35 pm

    It just goes to show that an idea can be improved upon. Wikipedia has a great site and gets a ton of attention for it but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the best way to pursue that idea. Only a large company like Google would have the power to challenge a site like Wikipedia, I think it’s a great idea.

  6. Rob Poitras

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:38 pm

    I think collective articles/guides can be even more helpful. With industries changing so much, hard for just one person to stay on top of it.

  7. Shakir Razak

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:39 pm

    Hi,

    It looks like, having lost out on the Q&A market, and not owning Digg or Wikipeda, and having seen the developments happening at companies like Answers.com, Google wants to create a better monetisation engine, regain the market-initiative/ownership and enable/provide content which would also get ranked by its competitors.

    Quite a cynical/commercial move, but it does look like it brings all the pieces together in one place like Finance.google did for its segment, which is good on a UI level, though also remains a non-player in the market.

    The only question is: will the serious content-generators bite, or will it be left to the sploggers, meta-posters and fanboys?

    Yours kindly,

    Shakir Razak

  8. Balke Macho

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:42 pm

    How are you people saying bye-bye wikipedia? I mean, really? Just because Google launches something does not mean it will succeed.

    Out of curiosity, what was Google’s last “game changer” out of the products they’ve thrown at us?

    This looks like About.com mashed with Wikipedia. Not very interesting. Google is yet to succeed in the UGC space and social in general — minus Orkut.

    I’d take Wikipedia any day.

  9. Adrian Keys

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:42 pm

    Is there some way of enforcing an anti-competitive clause to stop the Googs.

    @4 You are right…but they can always do the right thing and sell.

  10. jonathan

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    Please note that the original google blog post dose not mention the word “wiki “at any point. They are bold enough to compete against wikipedia and even dare to change the name to market their own “knol” word. Don’t get me know wrong here, i love google, but they are starting to act like microsoft….trying to copy any sort of successfull products. they should start the knol by defining innovation…so that they can remeber who the once were: open social, android, digg search results, etc etc….all “me too” products. it’s cool to integrate new trends into products and create similar ones, but still innovation is key. i belive “don’t be evil” should be changed for “no copycats” or something. i protest cause i want to keep defending google for years to come and the only way to do it is to innovate……

  11. Sina

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:46 pm

    I think this will be very useful for product reviews in particular. This isn’t something that Wikipedia handles, and I think it’ll be a great differentiator.

    Also, having a WYSIWYG editor should make writing articles considerably easier than Wikipedia.

  12. drew olanoff

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:48 pm

    This is a really interesting turn of events. Google IS a social network. They’re building the pieces first, and when all of the dots get connected, watch out.

  13. Shakir Razak

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:51 pm

    @8 You are right, but Gmail was pretty substantial.

    I think this, as with Blogger, is like any Advertising seller wants to do, own more capacity/content of their own to place adverts on.

    What they could have done if they were more idealistic is re-version Wikipedia, partnering with it, and even this I assume will include substantial content/links from Wikipedia.org; however, who will own the content on these Knols’?
    Will it be individual author copy-rightable, will someone like John Battelle be able to create one that will be about search/google that appears at the top of all related searches and points to hs content-properties?

    Kind regards,

    Shakir Razak

  14. Duncan Riley

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:52 pm

    I don’t believe this will kill Wikipedia and as Jonathan (#10) points out, this isn’t a Wiki project. It takes the focus on authoritative knowledge Wikipedia has (or the many smaller clones) and raps it in a Squidoo style setting (although notably the emphasis appears more on knowledge than links…unlike much of squidoo, or in particular say Mahalo). Sites like Squidoo (and to a lesser extent Mahalo) that rely on Google SERP’s in becoming authoritive destinations on topics have the most to lose here, and if Google decides to use Knol results instead of Wikipedia, Wikipedia won’t die, but it might eventually take some sort of traffic hit.

    Adrian Keys (#9)
    at some point it’s a question that will be asked at the highest levels, how big will the US Government allow the Google Borg to get before it intervenes?

  15. alan jones

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:53 pm

    I love that Rachel Manber’s been used for the mockup. I think she’s Udi Manber’s partner. Udi’s a search dev guru at Google. If you’ve seen him give a talk, you’ll know he’s nearly as effective as Rachel at helping people get off to sleep… ;-)

  16. Wes

    December 13th, 2007 at 8:58 pm

    I also think that this will kill off Wikipedia and I think it will is that when you search for something using Google you are likely to find results from the knols on the top and everything else later on. For me thats a bit worrying.

  17. Deals and Coupons

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:00 pm

    Why am I not surprised?

  18. Patrick Grote

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:01 pm

    It happens when you’re sleeping. It happens during the day. It happens in very slow, deliberate movements.

    One day, though, everyone will realize what Google has morphed into. No one will like it, but since they provide everything for free and spend their money on heart warming projects, no one will say anything.

    Remember, Google Power coming to a house near you. Yes, we’ll be more than happy to provide power to your home for free, just let us install these LCD panels with integrated cameras so we can provide content and a smidge of advertising as well. :-)

    Gee, I wonder where the “knols” will rank for search terms?

    Seriously, why didn’t they just buy out the wiki folks and be done with it?

  19. Jaisen

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:02 pm

    It’s a slippery slope when Google (or other search engines) push their own content in their search results.

  20. Paul Short

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:07 pm

    Is anyone else seeing a shift in the way Google is doing things? I’m seeing a company whose core product relied on aggregating and sifting content from other sites, to a move to them building (or buying) content (or the underlying technology) that they have ultimate control over.

  21. Patrick Grote

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    Paul Short … yep. The control they will extend over it is in the best interest of the user, don’t you know? :-)

  22. Hashim Warren

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    This project looks liable to spam and clickfraud. And with Google’s record with Blogspot spam, that’s exactly what they will let happen.

  23. Malcolm Lewis

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    Google continues its steady progression from a neutral content switch to a content owner with a vested interest in promoting it’s own content.

    Unlike the good old days when a Google SRPs simply guided you to other people’s content, soon all we’ll see at the top of a Google SRPs is links to Google content (eg local business info) or content managed, hosted or otherwise enabled by Google. In either case, Google will control the monetization and keep the lion’s share of the revenues.

    I predict a time when we’ll start our searches on Google and never leave some portion of the Google empire to get the info we need and/or acquire the products or services we seek.

    I read: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” I suspect their true mission is to own and control the world’s information and make it universally monetized by Google.

    IF most searches start on Google AND most searchers click on the top 5 results AND Google can give itself the top 5 spots for all lucrative searches THEN Google wins and the rest of us compete for the leftovers.

    Can’t say I blame them, I’d probably do the same if I were lucky enough to be in their position. But it’ll soon be the GWW not the http://WWW. Perhaps the greatest monopoly position in history.

  24. jonathan

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    To Duncan,

    Point taken. Wikipedia might not die, but the idea of google promotig the creation of content is kind of strange. I though their core mission was to become the finders of all the imformation of the world, not the sort of “keepers without intereference” type. I think google have still a lot to do when it comes to search and ads, and shouldn’t be distracting itself like yahoo did. growing too thin migh be dangerous. right know they are experimenting …and that’s good. but it’s important to stay focused.

  25. Balke Macho

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

    @14, “if Google decides to use Knol results instead of Wikipedia”?

    Eh? You mean if Google stops showing Wikipedia links in search results? Right now Wikipedia is a top result for many of the topics I search for organically (e.g. that little thing called PageRank that Google is somewhat known for). If Google starts artificially altering search results than they’ve officially gone evil.

    Wikipedia, is in a my mind, a force to be reckoned with. They were able to win over the academic community who are largely responsible for the content there. If Google is able to lure those users to a service like this then I think you would see it start to impact Wikipedia, but I don’t think that will happen.

  26. Santa Klaus

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:25 pm

    This is a move I don’t like and I am a big Google fan. These bastards are doing what we asked Wikipedia not to do. We asked them to keep Wikipedia free of ads and so far they kept it. Every year they get my donation and I will keep supporting them.

    Now comes almighty Google trying to screw a good project and making money while they are at it.

    Bad Google!!! BAD…. No Christmas gifts for you this year!

  27. George

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:25 pm

    @18 - They can’t buy Wikipedia since it’s a non-profit. Otherwise Jimmy Wales would have cashed out long time ago.

    Duncan, I have a hard time seeing how the revenue sharing will be implemented. How will this be done?

    - If I edit an article, do I get a portion relative to the size of my edit? If so what happens if someone entirely “rewrites” the article but only shuffles words and phrases around?
    - If the original author gets all, what stops somebody starting thousands of one word articles that some one else will fill in.
    - If it’s whoever has the highest rated rev gets all what will stop secret mailing lists/digg voting mafia to vote up certain people.
    - What about keeping things tidy? If it makes sense to merge two articles into one, why would the authors want to do it? They can make more money from organic search results by keeping the topics separate.

    If Google frowns on paid links because they spoil the integrity of page rank, why wouldn’t what are essentially paid wiki edits corupt the integrity of a knowledge base?

  28. Duncan Riley

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:27 pm

    Balke Macho
    it’s a big if; Google isn’t saying they will do this but they are talking about Knol’s being in search results, it may not be a one or the other equation. I also don’t (as I mentioned in the comments) believe this will kill wikipedia, wikipedia is way too entrenched and popular for that, but in some shape or form this will slow Wikipedia, be that in traffic growth or even through the loss of editors….they’re already seeing a slowing down in both those areas, where as Knols will simply increase the slow down…maybe even to the point of Wikipedia going in reverse…not to death at all (this 100% WONT kill wikipedia ) but they do get a lot of traffic from Google.

  29. Paul Montgomery

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    So uh… what happens if some enterprising “author” found a way to upload the entirety of Wikipedia to knols?

    No one seems to have mentioned it yet, but in addition to Wikipedia/Squidoo/Mahalo, this is also an attack on Citizendium.

  30. Duncan Riley

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:33 pm

    George (#27)
    based on what I’ve read and filling in some gaps
    1. Like Squidoo, an author “owns” the page
    2. It’s not a wiki so others cant just come along and edit it. There’s a voting (or peer review) process that Google will use as part of how they rank each Knol page in terms of authority, particularly given there will be duplicates.
    3. I’m presuming like Squidoo and similar sites that it will be a straight % cut of ads shown on pages: as it’s not a wiki and each page has an owner who gets paid this is the easy part. I’m guessing that it might be tied in to Adsense like Google Co-op is now
    4. The tidy part to me is where the idea may have its biggest flaw: Google are saying that they won’t mind duplicates and all knowledge is good etc… but having thousands of pages on Viagra and Mesothilioma will cheapen the site in a similar way to the millions of spam blogs on Blogger. They think the solution is in search, that may well be but it doesn’t make for (in my mind anyway) the best experience for the reader. Time will tell I guess.

  31. George

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    Duncan, are you sure about the “no edits” policy? The sample page has an edit tab and lists 245 edits. (Or is this the from the point of view of a logged-in author? That’s a lot of edits. Then again, this is a mockup.).

  32. Brian Bowman

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:55 pm

    Google has Joe Kraus & jotspot (a cool version of wetpaint), egroups (also wrote Yahoo groups), Brad Fitzpatrick (Livejournal / open social) — I see yahoo answers + wikipedia + wetpaint + groups + open social = the initial construct of the semantic web.

    Great idea for the creation of a highly scalable, user generated, open, searchable, advertising integrated, library of authoritative content.

    I find it thrilling to watch google “own nothing” (i.e. open platform / user owned) and “own everything” by having the primary index and advertising platform.

    Assuming they solve reputation — it will be a heck of a system.

  33. CAR

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

    i love wikipedia and google, but no way google can take over wikipedia, it’s huge and just perfect.

  34. Anatoly

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    Opensocial killed facebook.
    Google apps killed microsoft office.
    Gmail killed yahoo mail.
    Google maps killed mapquest.
    Android will kill Symbian.
    Picasa killed flickr.

    This will most certainly kill Wikipedia.

  35. Anatoly

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

    Oh, and most important of all — Google checkout killed Paypal.

  36. Parul Bindra

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:10 pm

    I think we all are just thinking too much about Google. Wikipedia is by far most in effect in getting people real structured content.

    Google has been the parallel of an actual tag search so far. Far less accurate than Wikipedia, Google mostly caters to business search and such.

    Google can be just a temporarily successful search engine.

    Parul
    http://www.bhopu.com

  37. Steve Ballmer

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:10 pm

    Wikki meets squido?
    Sounds like porn to me!

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  38. Alan Wilensky

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    I don’t think at this point that Google is a making a wise call, if indeed they are positioning this to muscle Wikipedia.

    At some point, you have to concede that the predominant player in the reference article niche is Wikipedia, and that it will be difficult, even for a behemoth like Google, to overcome the inertia in order to gather a community of zealous editors that have grown organically within the Wikipedia ecosystem.

  39. Duncan Riley

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:30 pm

    George (#31)
    It’s definitely not a wiki so pretty sure, if you take a look at the screenshot it’s a page as shown by someone logged into it as opposed to simply a casual visit, I’m presuming the same person owns the page. I could be wrong but that’s how I’ve read what Google has said in terms of editing so far.

  40. lawrence coburn

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

    Will people link to these articles like they do Wikipedia? And if they don’t, will Google cheat and push these articles to the top of the organic Serps? Because if these articles don’t show up in organic search results, this project is DOA.

  41. sation

    December 13th, 2007 at 10:59 pm

    anatoly-face book is bigger than open social., google apps is not bigger than office, gmail is good, i prefer yahoo mail, mapquest is still big, and wikipedia is huge, i mean look no way they can simply take over. google should do online dvd rental.

  42. Mitts Kane

    December 13th, 2007 at 11:00 pm

    Fake Steve Ballmer, with all due respect, please stop posting. You’re getting really freakin annoying!

  43. Name (required)

    December 13th, 2007 at 11:12 pm

    Google is venturing more and more away from it’s core competencies and values.

    I don’t see those making good content already taking the time to do Knol pages unless their creations get preferred treatment in Google results.

    And that would be a major additional step away from showing unbiased results, which has already been happening with the introduction of universal search, which is just pollution of Google’s 1st page search results with Google properties.

    If that preferred treatment happens (why not, they’re a company like any other), this might take people from making content to Wikipedia, where your knowledge and hard work on a subject is not rewarded in any way, and from making own web sites.

  44. J.P.

    December 13th, 2007 at 11:30 pm

    @Duncan: I quote from google Blog:

    “People will be able to submit comments, questions, EDITS, additional content, and so on.” (caps are mine)

    My guess: You can edit an article from somebody else, but She has to approve it.

  45. Duncan Riley

    December 13th, 2007 at 11:39 pm

    JP
    maybe so, certainly that would make a lot of sense, you can suggest edits but they have to be approved or what not. I’d still think in terms of rev share that the page owner gets the cut irrespective of later edits.

  46. Eli

    December 13th, 2007 at 11:48 pm

    Duncan Riley is the Court Jester of Hyperbole. “Game changing” before it even is released…awesome! I would call him the King of Hyperbole but that would be too generous…

  47. Sam

    December 13th, 2007 at 11:52 pm

    Wait. Anatoly (#34, 35)…. You’re just sarcastically demonstrating that Google does NOT automatically dominate every market they enter, right? I hope that’s the case, anyway.

    Google isn’t the market leader in any of those spaces. Not only are they not the leader, they’re not even close to being the leader.

  48. Duncan Riley

    December 14th, 2007 at 12:06 am

    Eli 46
    what else would you call a 1000 pound gorilla entering a space with a rev model that may kill some of the competition, and with the power via search to make it happen. It’s game changing in anyones book.

    Sam 47
    I think it was sarcasm, but as much as it’s easy to point out Google’s failures it overlooks the power it has in many more areas. When you wake up one day next year and Knol is the top result for something you’re search for, what then? they f*cked up answers because it wasn’t open to anyone (you had to be approved to answer + get paid), they’re not making the same mistake twice. This is all about volume + presence + showing ads, Google has learnt from its mistakes

  49. David Gerard

    December 14th, 2007 at 12:32 am

    Speaking as a Wikipedia editor - it looks like they’re bending over backwards not to make this actually freely reusable content. Which, y’know, they could easily do (all editors agree to release their work under GFDL or CC-by-sa). So that immediately makes it less interesting to Wikipedia in terms of what we’re actually doing, which is a lot more than running a hugely expensive website with no ads. This immediately places Knol with about.com and Scholarpedia.

    If the quality of the work is good, we’d probably use it for references, like we do about.com.

  50. Steven Hodson

    December 14th, 2007 at 12:42 am

    Duncan (48)

    While it might be space changing as I pointed out both in my post (http://www.winextra.com/2007/12/14/knol-a-potential-fertile-ground-for-smart-spammers-and-marketers/) and in a reply to a comment by MG Siegler the problem is going to be that given their care and control of things like splogs and link farms etc what can we expect the quality of these Knol’s to be like. Especially since you could easily end up with more than just simple duplicates of topics once marketing firms and other less reputable people join the party.

  51. Duncan Riley

    December 14th, 2007 at 12:50 am

    David (49)
    I’d love to get your feedback as to whether you’d contribute to Knol at all, particularly give the getting paid carrot?

    Steven (50)
    As I’ve noted in some comments above, the bogey is the duplicate content as the hands-off approach to pages. I suppose the question becomes as to whether Google will give authorities to outbound links on Knol pages. The demo page doesn’t have a lot of outbound links at all (say like Squidoo) so although it’s possible it could be gamed, I’m thinking that those possibilities may be limited (although again: given they’re not editing it I’m not sure how).

  52. Chris

    December 14th, 2007 at 1:16 am

    Shvoong.com seems to be on that field as well

  53. Shakir Razak

    December 14th, 2007 at 1:21 am

    Hi,

    There are so many things people don’t understand…..

    This is a sand-box, google has 60% + market-share, you enter it’s world for search, you go to somewhere else on its field (youtube, blogger, et al), you return back to search for the next leg of your journey.
    It has control of how results are presented on a granular level, digg-type ranking will sort out splogs, as well as many other measures inc. history……

    Google, has the humility to learn from it’s mistakes, even if some might think its ambitions are arrogant.
    At Thi stage, Google doesn’t need, nor expects that all it’s properties be dominant from the getgo, only where there is direct immediate competitive threat where it might need to act quicker.
    However, by repeated cross-networking and bouncing around, the whole value to google of sector-bit-players can be leveraged to be cumalatively greater in the whole then would otherwise be individually -it’s an amorphous cloud-type concept/model.

    It does come to something though, when such a a young company is already at the stage where it mimics Microsoft, where it’s arrogance leads it to use terms such as Labels instead of existing practice of Tags, or Knol instead of managed-wiki’s.

    Google learnt early from the Open-source crowd, as all it’s prperties operate, better to create the tools, and give free access, for the worker bees to actually do the hardest part -creat content.

    Enjoy while you want, or you could just type something else into that thing, you know, um…ADDRESS-BAR !!!

    Yours kindly,

    Shakir Razak

  54. max

    December 14th, 2007 at 1:54 am

    Stop the Google revolution by investing in the new Quarter Wiki! Lol…

  55. David Gerard

    December 14th, 2007 at 2:06 am

    Duncan @51: Probably not, I doubt I’d be motivated enough :-)

    But I must note, it looks like I was dead wrong about the licence - the PNG example (http://www.google.com/images/blogs/knol_lg.png) shows a CC-by-3.0 tag. As far as I’m concerned that’s a BIG WIN for Wikipedia and what we do - making free content *normal and expected*. If they require contributions to be under a proper free content licence, then I’m suddenly a BIG FAN.

  56. BlackVivi

    December 14th, 2007 at 2:22 am

    Google should acquire a wiki based news site instead, like http://www.cjreport.com
    We have wikipedia, we don’t need another one.

  57. Philipp Lenssen

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:03 am

    > they should start the knol by defining innovation…so that
    > they can remeber who the once were: open social, android,
    > digg search results, etc etc….all “me too” products.

    Google web search itself in 1998 was also a “me too” product. Altavista for instance was around doing the exact same thing — only much, much worse, which turns out to be whole difference. But I agree with your point about how the announcement post by Google is kind of pointing in the direction of Wikipedia with strangely enough never mentioning Wikipedia.

  58. Philipp Lenssen

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:05 am

    > The demo page doesn’t have a lot of outbound
    > links at all (say like Squidoo) so although it’s
    > possible it could be gamed, I’m thinking that
    > those possibilities may be limited (although again:
    > given they’re not editing it I’m not sure how).

    There’s stillt he “nofollow” attribute for links, which Google could add to any link automatically and still say they don’t edit it.

  59. maximilian

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:27 am

    I feel most people have missed the point that a knol is not like a wikipedia entry. It is written by _one_ author, not collaboratively. A knol is more like a blog post, in that sense (with comments).

  60. Tom Nixon

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:19 am

    It’s already been shown that Wikipedia entries have more factual innacuracies than Encyclopedia Britannia articles. This is in spite of the community editorial process in Wikipedia. Obviously the advantage of Wikipedia is the breadth and depth of knowledge and the fact it can be kept up-to-date.
    With no editorial at all on Knol (just the passive acts of rating and commenting), and no guarantees that the author will keep the page up-to-date; correct errors; or clear up any issues of bias, it’s likely to be overall less useful content in my opinion.
    Authors who truly want to add to the world’s body of knowledge have the perfect opportunity to do this in wikipedia. What does Knol really add other than a revenue opportunity, and will this be such a big motivator for authors?

  61. Jay

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:22 am

    Wikipedia (50M+ uniques) tends to be result #2 or #3 for A LOT of Google search results, it makes sense for Google to want to keep some of those people within the Google ecosystem.

  62. Saurabh Kaushik

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:45 am

    Knol is Wikipedia by Google. But it has better features for author to monetize written page, related search box and Peer review widget.

    I think it is great to have a better version of wikipedia and I am sure Google will do greater job in this area.

    I would certainly not advocate the monopoly, but you got to be smarter and quicker to kill the beast, otherwise the story repeat itself.

  63. techcrunchreader

    December 14th, 2007 at 6:10 am

    Good post Duncan.

    I think it’s a good idea. Some people writting wikis for Wikipedia are often upset because “their” page or article is altered by someone.

    This project looks more like a Squidoo lens then a Wikipedia wiki.

    Also, if they share revenue, the users are not working for free so it encourages more contribution and competition.

  64. Frank Stallone

    December 14th, 2007 at 6:38 am

    A killer idea for 4 or 5 years ago. I don’t think this will fly. I don’t think top quality content will come in sufficient numbers. That is crucial. A minor success at best.

  65. gr

    December 14th, 2007 at 7:58 am

    Now, there is a conflict of interest between goog and the rest of the web. Goog can potentially clone the web (under the pretense of independently authored Knols) and own it all — embrace and extend.

  66. Karl Engblom

    December 14th, 2007 at 7:59 am

    Why not let Google give it a try? Wikipedia certainly has its shortcomings:
    1. The lack of recognition for contributors. Right now, the major form of recognition is the opportunity to have your work in the Wikipedia entry’s list of references. Your actual contribution is anonymous,and the smartest people are usually too busy to contribute to something without getting credit for it.

    2. People messing around with articles. No comment necessary.

    3. Outdated statistics. Updating statistics is boring compared to writing articles, so there are plenty of outdated statistics on Wikipedia. Finding statistics from original sources is daunting –noone has ever found what he’s looking for on a US government website, for example. Here’s a challenge for Google: why not persuade the original sources to provide you with direct, easy-to-digest statistics feeds? Then, whenever you are looking for a fact, you won’t get something that an unknown person cut-and-pasted from an unknown source at an unknown point in time, but the actual figures, straight from the responsible entity.

    If Google solves these issues, Wikipedia has some serious competition.

  67. Matt

    December 14th, 2007 at 9:39 am

    The sucess of Knol will depend on how accurate the information is vs. Wikipedia and I don’t see how anyone will trust Knol over Wikipedia.

  68. Victor Lai

    December 14th, 2007 at 10:08 am

    In response to Jonathan (10):
    Why does a company need to invent something completely new to receive everyone’s approval? The reason Google got so big is because people like you and I USE their services everyday - they’re better than the competition. When they were starting out, these boards were full of Google-love, now they’ve get compared to Microsoft whenever they release a new product. Let the gov’t deal with antitrust issues. Advertising allows for free services - that is the future and Google is embracing it.

    If they can do it better, isn’t that better for everyone?

  69. stephen

    December 14th, 2007 at 10:50 am

    the monetary incentive and author central mentality will damp the community spirit. i’m sure there will be some decent aspects, but there will be significant splintering of contributors with people trying to carve up the topic space for $$ => hello unstructured, noisy, redundant pseudo authoritative barf spamathelioma. definitely not a wikipedia killer like the later posts have pointed out… more like a mahalo killer, but thats not saying much…its like having mike tyson fight a dying bunny. hopefully they won’t resort to heavily “tweaking” wikipedia pages down in their SERPs in favor of these pages.

  70. DavidEzra

    December 14th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    “The advantace of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources - labor, capital and human ingenuity - in a manor that can’t be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner.” Freidrich von Hayek

    In my mind, what it boils down to is this - who trumps who?

    The free market … or a brilliant central planner / author!

    Who will the masses look to as the both the most authoritative and - perhaps most important - the most objective source?

    A number of people editing the same article would seem to lend to credibility for being perceived as being “unbiased” … as opposed to a single individual - who, although knowledgeable - is still beholden to certain opinions and views.

    (Moreover, both are dependent on “contributers.” In my mind, the one that wins will be the one that has the superior content, which is a function of being able to attract the most numerous - and qualified - authors. If Google is perceived as being “evil” - this will definitely hurt them on a strategic front.)

  71. Faramarz

    December 14th, 2007 at 2:06 pm

    Oddly enough, i was watching Seth Godin’s marketing lecture at Googleplex earlier today and he touches this very subject, with a quick plugin of his own service . (Seth founded Squidoo)

    looks like they took his motivation to heart and are about ready to demolish him.

  72. Jon

    December 15th, 2007 at 12:59 am

    I once thought Google was a respectable company but this past few years all they have been doing is buying out companies and now there trying to ripoff from Wikipedia’s success.

  73. Mike (San Jose)

    December 15th, 2007 at 6:06 am

    Knol is a code name (i.e. see “Longhorn” and Windows Vista).

    The official name of the service is going to be GPedia (like Gmail), short for GooglePedia.com.

    –
    Mike

  74. SticKer

    December 15th, 2007 at 10:59 pm

    It wont be long before Google’s Knol (GPedia) will be competiting with Wikipedia.

    SticKer

    Webmaster Forum | Webmaster Blog

  75. armygames

    December 18th, 2007 at 6:11 am

    In addition to the U.S Army All-American Bowl, Sportslink Inc., the sports marketing company managing the U.S Army All-American Bowl also conducts high school sports like the U.S Army All-American base ball games which feature the top high school prospects of the country.

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