Google has kicked off a project to create an authoritative store of information about any and every topic…
“Search engine has unveiled “knol,” an online, user-generated reference work that will seek to usurp Wikipedia … Beta Version of Knol Includes Identified Authors, Rankings and Ads…”
New York — Web search leader Google Inc. is testing an Internet site for sharing knowledge about any subject under the sun, one that could eventually compete with the popular user-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia.
“The common consensus in the media is that Google’s new “knoll” tool will be aimed squarely at Wikipedia, and in fact the sample Web page on display in Udi Manber’s blog post does bear some passing resemblance to a typical Wikipedia page. But other features suggest Google’s target is less Wikipedia than it is About.com.”
The new platform, which is being privately tested, will allow users to create Web pages that contain their photos and entries about a wide variety of subjects. The new tool is built around the concept of a “knol,” which the company says stands for a unit of knowledge.
In an announcement on Google’s corporate blog, Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering, said a knol on a particular subject “is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.” Wikipedia currently fills that role for many people searching for information on the Internet.
“Google is to go head-to-head with Wikipedia, the web’s largest reference work, setting up a clash between two of the web’s biggest brands.”
The search giant has already started inviting people to write about the subject on which they are known to be an expert. Google said it would not act as editor for the project but will provide the tools and infrastructure for the pages.
“There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it,” Manber said in the post.
The search giant said its aim is to encourage Internet users to share their knowledge on a wide variety of topics, including scientific concepts, medical information, geographical knowledge, historical events, entertainment and how-to-fix-it instructions. Readers will be able to submit comments and questions, suggest edits, and rate and review the entries.
As on Wikipedia, content on knol will be free to access. In a departure from the non-profit Wikipedia model, however, knol’s authors will be able to attach advertising to their work and take a share of revenues.
Manber said that, unlike Wikipedia, which relies on the collective and relatively anonymous contributions of many different editors, Google’s knols will be primarily written by a single, identified author whose credentials will be displayed at the top of each knol.
Manber, who had been chief executive of Amazon.com Inc.’s A9 subsidiary before joining Google last year, stressed that “Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content,” he emphasized. “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.”
“Many experts see the initiative as an attack on the widely used Wikipedia communal encyclopedia.”
By indexing the web, Google strives to make information more easily accessible. However, wrote Manber, not all the information on the web was “well organized to make it easily discoverable.”
But Google is considering several different features, the most provocative of which is a search ranking system that will affect how high the knols appear in Google search results. Manber said that Google anticipates that there will be competing knols for some topic, and rankings will help readers decide which knols are the most reliable and useful.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he was unconcerned about Google knol because it seemed to him that Google would end up compiling a series of blogs rather than an authoritative encyclopedia. With more than 75,000 active contributors, 2.1 million English-language articles and a dominant position in search results, Wikipedia has a huge head start.
Wikipedia represents another similarly well-established incumbent. In October the online encyclopedia, which relies on donations for funds, was visited by “107 million people,” or a third of the “active global internet population,” according to Nielsen Online, the analyst. That made it the eighth most-visited online destination.
Google’s search engine was the world’s most popular site, with more than 260 million users — though its own reference work, Google Scholar was only fifteenth in its class, with about 4.5 million users.
In August 2007, a British graduate student developed WikiScanner, a program that identified the authors behind Wikipedia edits. The program revealed that people at the IP addresses of several major companies made changes to their own or competitors’ entries.
“That has been a fairly serious problem with Wikipedia,” Silicon Valley technology analyst Rob Enderle said.
“Enderle contends that identifying the author gives Knol an extra layer of credibility.”
Google’s main challenge in competing with Wikipedia will be people’s current Web habits, according to Enderle.
“People are creatures of habit,” he said. “If Wikipedia can deal with a trust problem, they can stand up against this.”
Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and a frequent technology commentator, dismissed fears about Google manipulating results. He said Google is hoping that the most popular knol pages will rise naturally through the search results, challenging Wikipedia and providing another area of content that can carry Google ads.
“I do not foresee Google manipulating its search results to put knol pages ahead of Wikipedia pages,” he said.
However, Google’s determination that knol should turn a profit appears to have dictated a sharp departure from Wikipedia’s editorial model. Where Wikipedia is based on collaboration between authors, knol will foster rivalry.
Contributors to knol will not be able to contribute anonymously and will not be able to edit each others’ work — two of the defining characteristics of Wikipedia. Whereas in Wikipedia, readers find only one entry on, say, the First World War, on knol authors will submit separate pieces that will compete for advertising income.
Rebecca Jennings, an analyst for Forrester, said: “Google is setting out to compete in social media, where it is lagging rivals such as Facebook.”
Google’s key challenge will be to attract a critical mass of quality content contributors, which in turn will help drive readers to the knols. The company hopes to do so by highlighting authors, a feature that could draw some Wikipedia contributors have grown tired of toiling behind the scenes.
But Google has a history of launching many new products that have failed to attract users. Google Base, for example, was expected by some to encroach on online auctioneer eBay Inc.’s listing service, but impact has been minimal at best.
Carr suggested Google’s knol initiative might face a similar fate. “Its success is a long way from being assured. Google has launched a whole lot of products that just have not caught on. This may be one of those,” he said.
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and now has more than eight million articles in 253 languages – from Afrikaans to Zazaki. In contrast to Google, it has refused to alter its policies to operate in different countries – something that has led it to being blocked in states such as China.