Knol is no Knoll

According to Wikipedia a Knol is a project planned by Google for user-generated articles on topics ranging from “scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.” It was announced on December 13, 2007. Knol pages are “meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read”, according to Udi Manber, a Vice President of Engineering at Google. The term knol, coined by Google to mean a “unit of knowledge”, refers to both the project and an article in the project. The site has been widely seen as Google’s attempt to compete against Wikipedia.

 

Google is no fool. When you type in any topic in Google, most likely a Wikipedia entry will make the top ten in the search engine. Wikipedia is a non-profit site and does not generate money on their site. The site really belongs to the people, so why try to generate money for the site. It is driven by donations. What is “poor” Google to do, instead of buying Wikipedia, you build your own and prop it up with ads. It’s a free market, sooner or later somebody had to exploit a great idea. Google will take no responsibility for the content fed into Knol. Let’s hope this project is reciprocal to the authors, you create the content and Google will generate revenue for themselves as you use Knol. Will you? Think not. Knol will not be a knoll, but a Mount Everest that will fill the coffers of shareholders. Ads make sense, adsense that is.