“In a twist to encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows anonymity, Knol will identify expert content providers who will own their pages.”
San Francisco — Google Inc. on Wednesday, just seven months after it announced plans to launch its own Wikipedia-type project, is taking the wraps off its publishing-and-reference service called Knol, allowing people to write about their areas of interest under their bylines and to make money from them.
“We are profoundly convinced that authorship — knowing who wrote what — helps readers trust the content,” said Cedric DuPont, product manager for Knol.
The service, dubbed “Knol” refers to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.
Now, according to the Official Google Blog, anyone having a Google login will be able to access and submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the Internet search leader’s marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be related to the topic covered in the knol.
The concept though, is relatively akin to that used by Wikipedia; Google said it is not looking to contend unsympathetically with the established site. The company said it is focusing on highlighting the authors who submit articles to the site. Each Knol will have a single author or group of authors whose name or names will appear with their contributions, Google noted in a blog post.
“The Web contains enormous amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the Web,” Google said. “A massive amount of information resides in people’s heads: Millions of people know useful things, and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.”
In an interview, Dupont, described the service as a way to improve Google’s search results by making the “information in people’s heads” searchable. While Knol entries would not be given any preferential treatment in Google’s search algorithm, Knol entries that are highly ranked by users could surface higher in search results if they are established to have quality content, he said.
Google’s service in a way differs from the user-generated Wikipedia online encyclopedia in a number of ways. In particular, rather than stick to one article on a topic, Knol will allow many articles — making it as much a collection of individual blogs as an online encyclopedia.
Knol has adopted a new concept that Google calls it a “moderated collaboration,” where any reader can make suggested edits to a Knol, which the author can choose to accept, reject or modify for inclusion on the site, Google said.
Knol has publishing tools similar to single blog pages. But unlike blogs, Knol encourages writers to reduce what they know about a topic to a single page that is not chronologically updated.
“What we want to get away from is [this last voice wins] model which is very difficult if you are a busy professional,” DuPont said.
Google wants to rank entries by popularity to encourage competition. For example, the first Knol on “Type 1 Diabetes” is by Anne Peters, director of the University of Southern California’s Clinical Diabetes Programs.
And as other writers publish on diabetes, Google plans to rank related pages according to user ratings, reviews and how often people refer to specific pages, DuPont said.
Knol also includes various community tools to allow users to submit comments, ratings or write reviews. Mashable blogger Adam Ostrow wrote that because Knol allows authors to insert AdSense ads on their Knols and earn money based on clicks, “this sounds a lot less like the community collaborating on authoritative articles (Wikipedia) and a lot more like a potential land grab to create content for keywords.”
However, he admitted that offering the ability for anyone to comment or review an article raises or lowers the authority of that article and should keep “would-be opportunists” at bay.
“In giving a single author control over each Knol and its edits, it is hard to imagine the service will be as authoritative as Wikipedia, which many would argue has its own biases,” Ostrow added. “Meanwhile, Knol could still be a huge traffic generator for Google and steal visitors from Wikipedia if it is integrated in search results — something Google has not been shy about doing with other properties like YouTube.”
Unlike Wikipedia, Knol requires the authors to attach their names to Knol entries to help the audience assess the source’s credibility. Google does not intend to screen the submissions for accuracy, Dupont said, and instead will rely on its search formulas to highlight the articles that readers believe are credible.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said it “is a bit early to tell” whether Knol will generate the sort of content that would make it a Wikipedia competitor. He said it seems “far more like a collaborative blogging platform” that he expects will generate “a lot of opinion pieces rather than encyclopedic content.”
Danny Sullivan, a blogger at Search Engine Land, remarked that the best way to describe Knol is Wikipedia with moderation. “The collaborative advantage to Wikipedia is also its disadvantage,” Sullivan stated. “Since anyone is allowed to contribute, some introduce factual errors or overtly vandalize articles. It is one reason that Wikipedia is considering moderation.”
“We think moderated collaboration mode will solve a large part of the problem” of complaints about accuracy that have plagued Wikipedia, Dupont said. There will, no doubt, be multiple knols on any one topic.
Google is partnering with The New Yorker magazine to allow any author to add a cartoon from the magazine to their Knol. Knol authors can run ads with them, as well, and receive a cut of the revenue from Google.
“The ultimate goal is we want to improve search,” he added.
A quick look at some of the topics on the Knol page revealed many written by doctors that had to do with medical conditions, including an excellent article on rheumatoid arthritis. There also were some from The Family Handyman magazine on subjects including toilet clogs and installing a bathroom vanity.
A search on a few other topics yielded no or few results. For instance, there was one result for “dance” and it had no content, just a link to a related but not informative YouTube video.
The advertising option could encourage people to write more entries about commercial subjects than the more academic topics covered in traditional encyclopedias.
Since Google disclosed its intention to build “nol, it has been widely viewed as the company’s answer to Wikipedia, which has emerged as one of the Web’s leading reference tools by drawing upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.
Dupont said other media partnerships are possible. The company declined to comment whether Google is making any money off the deal.