Hello Google Knol; goodbye Wikipedia?

This came out while I was at Search Insider. It's interesting that Google is encouraging people to use knowledge for creating content similar to Wikipedia.

At first, it's a beta by invitation only. Google wants these people to use a tool called "knol," which stands for a unit of knowledge, to write what they know about a particular subject.

The Google Blog envisions a knol as an authoritative article in such areas as science, medicine, geography, history, entertainment, product information, how-to-fix-it info, etc.

Google will be testing this concept in beta and then plans to open participation in knols.

It won't be edited, like on Wikipedia. Google says it will only rank the knols but you can't expect all of them to be perfect. Their job is to rank them appropriately in Google SERPs.

Google wants to increase dissemination of knowledge and highlight authors. Here's the description of a knol from the Google Blog:

"At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content."

Source: Google Blog

Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer

12:42 PM 0 comments

Comments