Google's Wikipedia clone Knol launches. | Hacker News Reader

Google's Wikipedia clone Knol launches.

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62 pointsptm57 comments

There are many things about this project that don't make any sense, as others have commented; it is not a wiki, does not compete with Wikipedia, seems to stand alone from other Google products in terms of design and yet they still haven't changed the name even after the owner of knol.com refused to sell.

One of the things that I like about Wikipedia is that I can just hand craft a /wiki/Title URL - Knol's URLs are obfuscated behind strange ID's and author's names. Do they not consider these things?

On a similar topic, I'll never understand why they decided to shelve Google Answers - there could have been a great synergy between that community and a wiki.

Knol will fail simply because it does not beat Wikipedia in any respect.

Was this born from a 20% side project by any chance? I can imagine some executive sitting behind his desk thinking "we need to buy wikipedia, but we can't.. so anyway, this knol thing looks close enough.. let's promote it to production".

They have a plan. :)

I posted this when they launched Lively:

> in this view it also makes sense for them to take over Wikipedia and Flickr

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244629

Now they've got their own product that fills the Wikipedia gap and is also more suited to their purposes.

What stops people from gaming this by creating automated posts to make money on adsense?

Looks like an About.com clone, to me. There's no "wiki" involved here...the point of a wiki is "anyone can edit it", not what data the wiki happens to contain. WikiPedia is first, and foremost, a wiki. (Secondly, it's a culture. The data it contains only comes in a distant third, I think.)

It's surprisingly frustrating to see "more that 25 million" in an online encyclopedia and not be able to fix the typo.

It looks like a Squidoo clone to me, more than an About.com or Wikipedia clone.

Agreed. Squidoo clone.

I didn't see the word wiki anywhere in that article.

I didn't see the word wiki anywhere in that article.

I was referring to the title of the submission, which called Knol a "Wikipedia clone". I merely pointed out that Knol is nothing like Wikipedia.

Does anybody else think the design looks a bit two-faced?

Serious-looking, authoritative text - and a round, cartoony button asking you to help out.

EDIT: Also, the site can't seem to decide whether it wants to be single-spaced or double-spaced. And it's not certain of what fonts it wants to use, either.

Word. I'm getting sick of Google's lack of design sense. Either stick with the spartan, or hire some good designers. I'm sure that horrendous 'write something' button was the result of an A-B test, but the knol logo is an embarrassment.

Yeah. That's the problem I have with Google. They have functionality that's second-to-none, but they have no taste for visuals. I'm debating moving entirely over to MobileMe for email, for instance, forsaking lack of tabs for the sake of not hating my screen when Gmail's showing. (I also find it funny that Google-leaving founders have the same taste: FriendFeed's visual update is one of the few updates that was noticeably a step backwards.)

And for the love of God, you're right. That is embarrassing logo if I ever saw one. Writing the message out in plaintext, the logo itself, and the miniature scaling... I was hoping Knol could actually look BETTER than Wikipedia, and this is not looking good.

That begs an important question: What's good design?

Good design in a magazine print ad is different from good design on a fashion blog is different from good design in a web app or a mail client.

So good design should be judged in terms of what it's supposed to do. In that light it seems the best design for Gmail is that which gets in the way least, because it's efficiency that counts when you're using it.

It's a matter of form follows function, always. But form includes the impression the end user gets. That's why big buttons don't always work.

For Knol, that feel ought to include a stately manner. Something large buttons don't convey well.

With Gmail, there's quite a lot of clutter. Google tends to have a lot of clutter. Curves where you don't need curves, visual tics that don't have to be there. the ribbon that highlights the Inbox. The bulkiness of the selector.

I noticed this on Windows, much more now that I'm on a Mac. Google wastes pixels not for functionality but for this idea of a design. They could smooth it out, add much more color contrast, make things more usable while still looking nice, without much of an effort. But they rarely do. Gmail and Google Reader are the two hugest offenders, I find; Maps and their actual Search are good comparisons, because very little space is wasted.

I think the problem lies in the fact that Knol exists squarely between "engineering design" (re: Gmail, Wikipedia) and pro design.

Both extremes work over the long-term, but the murky middle makes no sense. It's a half-attempt and the site looks worse for it.

Not really sure why people keep calling this a Wikipedia clone - seems much closer to Squidoo than to Wikipedia, to me. Granted, that's a debate that's already been had and done (back in December, if I recall correctly).

* disclaimer: I have worked with Squidoo in the past, and still have a couple of lenses there. I'm not taking a position on which is better - just pointing out a better comparison.

Don't know about Squidoo, but based on my brief look at Knol it seems very distinct from Wikipedia for a single reason: individual authors credited along with name, photo and profile link.

I think this flies in the face of many things that made Wikipedia a success.

Not to mention my first instinct was to visit knol.com, the website of a Dutch company who manufactures something resembling a crippled R2D2 using a walker.

I vote against this project as a serious rival for Wikipedia but only time will tell.

Squidoo and Knol seems to have the same idea behind it. Knol has the advantage of looking very nice in the process, and - of course - being sponsored by Google. Seth Godin is bright, but Squidoo is not fun to use and not fun to look at. Knol has an edge there.

The fact that Google didn't buy Knol.com is sort of odd, agreed.

I don't think this can compete against Wikipedia. It can, however, serve as a supplement - it doesn't have the disadvantage of tyrannical, half-crazed admins. That makes it much freer than Wikipedia, in a sense, and that'll give it an advantage in quantity, if not quality.

I bet those crippled R2D2's start flying off the shelf. (I also went to knol.com first). Could they become the next utube.com?

It's the 'pedia part that's like wikipedia. Not the wiki part. They want to make an online encyclopedia.

I hope it succeeds, wikipedia is so full of wrong, but verifiable, information that it's hard to use it. (ColdFusion, UFO's, and the Singularity, are wonderful examples of wrong, but verifiable.)

Curious the front page has "Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F" on the right hand side above the listing of Knols...

I saw that as a typical example of Google humor. But from the way the site's laid out it also looks like they're trying to make Knol a standalone thing. They don't want people looking at this page and thinking Google.

If that was the case, they would probably get a dedicated domain for it instead of using knol.google.com.

Yeah. As I said elsewhere in the thread - that's weird for them. Possibly a sign of the product's being so new?

From the article:

We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.

Is today April 1? Does adding a pseudo-intellectual New Yorker cartoon to every page really make the information seem more useful to people?

Maybe Wikipedia can compete by giving you a free Tufte quote with every edit.

I missed the cartoons bit. Where can I access the cartoons collection of the New Yorker magazine?

I am totally just going ratings whore on those knols. If a nice cartoons makes users rate my knols higher, that's fine by me - whatever. It is simply a game Google forces me to play to increase the search rank of my web sites.

It is simply a game Google forces me to play to increase the search rank of my web sites.

Can you expand on that?

I assume that links from Knols will factor quite well into the search rank, at least if they also have good ratings. Therefore to compete with other sites on the same subject as my web site, I will have to create a knol with good ratings linking to my site.

Of course the professional SEOs will also fake the ratings by creating their own voting networks and so on. We will see...

Well, I'm assuming (hoping?) Google won't tamper with PageRank to give special consideration to Knols (if they did, the backlash would be huge). I don't really see how a Knol's rating would affect its impact on any external pages it links to - I'm assuming their search rank will be determined the same way as that of any other site, based on keywords and incoming links rather than rating.

That's the optimistic view, but I am not taking chances for the time being.

Great, another Google service I am forced to use to increase the search rank of my web site :-(

Edit: done entering a knol about "Mondkalender" (moon calendars). I really have mixed feelings about this... What would people's incentive be to write on knol rather than on their own blog? Presumably Knol articles will be rated higher, so Google's power forces people to use Knol (certainly no SEO will skip knolling). On the other hand with the rating and personal credibility effect, it could yield some interesting results.

One of the reasons I love wikipedia is that its neutral and no ads. Google Im sure will have plans to stick in some adsense and share revenue with the author. Why should I contribute to an article bcos of which the original author might get paid.

Even if there willbe no ads , with the author's profile there, any contribution I may make doesnt feel like, Im part of it. I love all contibutors being annonymous in wikipedia

I vote this me-too project down.

Obviously Knol is structured to reward/encourage authors, not contributors. Hopefully the result will be not a Wikipedia-killer but something with a different flavor.

Wont it be more like a blog then? Except ofcourse worrying about how to get traffic

Yeah, Google needs to add some kind of benefit that you can't get from just posting an article on your blog. The real name verification is interesting but hardly compelling.

They pay you a piece of ad money from your page. (If you want. You can also disable ads.)

Blogs also have this feature.

This looks like something really great. I think that a "google wikipedia clone" can only benefit the web, by offering innovative features to the "web encyclopedia" space. This is something distinctly different and I like it. From the short time i've spent on the site it looks like this could be pretty big.

You're joking right? Basically, they're going to populate their encyclopedia by pillaging the information out of wikipedia. Search engines should not be competing with content providers.

How can it be pillaging when the whole point of Wikipedia is that the information in it is free for everyone else to use?

Problem is that Google will rank their articles higher than Wikipedia's and will suck the traffic out of Wikipedia and then who will edit Wikipedia?!

If this is the case, then it would compromise the credibility of Google search results. I think it's too early to say for certain if Google views Wikipedia as such a huge threat that it would go out of its way to create a new project for the sole purpose of intentionally ranking them higher than Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is as much of an icon of the internet as Google. I'm predicting that Knol will go the way of Google Answers for the same reason why Digg remains a stalwart of user generated news - it's the community.

Google definitely views Wiipedia as a potential threat. Just look at their SERPs... Wikipedia links are usually in the top 5 on pretty much every factual term.

Google does see them a threat ever since the Wiki project founders started work on an open search engine: http://re.search.wikia.com/index.html

Wikipedia already makes the information free to use, and other sites freely republish this information (notably answers.com); this doesn't hurt Wikipedia.

However, if you set up a Wikipedia clone -- allowing both reading and editing -- it hurts Wikipedia because it "splits the hive mind". If both sites become equally popular, we can expect the number of edits to be divided between them. Since Wikipedia succeeds because of network effects, a Wikipedia with half as many edits becomes less than half as useful.

That said, Knol does not appear to be a direct clone of Wikipedia; it emphasizes authorship, it allows multiple people to write on the same topic, and it allows opinion, trivia, irrelevant topics, and all the other things that are against Wikipedia guidelines. It will be interesting to see what role it assumes relative to Wikipedia. I wonder, for instance, how they plan to prevent Knol from turning into the next Geocities?

Simple. They don't let people create terrible 90s-esque designs for a page. Most "amateur content providers" (I remember Geocities mentioning something like that) won't stick around if they can't make it look terrible.

In other news, knol.com seems awfully slow today.

The big difference I see is that you can have several competing knols on the same or overlapping subjects.

Big consequences - you don't need to spend a lot of time and effort enforcing NPOV through consensus - people can express their own POV

The articles, even those by MDs, read like the sort of padded, plodding writing-for-hire crap used to manipulate Google's rankings.

Google should be fighting "MFA" (Made-For-Adsense) content, not joining the party.

Still, what I'd like most from an open encyclopedia project is a simple, stable API. There are external projects bringing this to Wikipedia, but Google (API frontrunners that they sometimes are) don't have this at all. Hope they add it soon.

Knol? Knoll?

Will there be any confusion with Knoll, the 80 year-old internationally recognized and respected design institution?

What is to stop people from ripping articles from wikipedia and posting them en masse to earn adsense revenue?

Why would anyone visit such pages? Much will depend on how Google Search treats Knol pages.

Is the GFDL compatible with the Knol license?

Knol doesn't distinctly look like a google page. It seems like they are trying a new layout and design.

Yet another attempt by Google!!! Knol.... hmmmm... Maybe Google should try acquiring wikipedia instead.. ;) !!!

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