3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia
thenextweb.org
thenextweb.org
[0] => No ads and it is clean. It is made by people who don't intend to make money, created by people whose world don't revolve around money and read by people who value knowledge more than money.
[1] => Wikipedia is millions of pages ahead of Google Knol when it comes to content. 7 million pages in 200 languages. Money can't buy you that.
[2] => Wikipedia is synonymous with knowledge but with Google Knol, only the first four letters match, that is the closest it comes to knowledge.
I can go on, but will stop here. This is Google's narrow minded way of making money by showing more ads. They clearly were directing lot of traffic to Wikipedia pages, they realized why direct the traffic to some other site when we can let users steal content from Wikipedia and show it in Knol.
- Knol articles aren't CC-licensed by default. So not only can't people log in and update them (a facility which, arguably, makes Wikipedia a bit too dynamic) but they can't even clone them under their own byline and make fixes. The result is going to be a bunch of sad-looking abandoned articles, like the dregs of About.com. Say what you will about Wikipedia: The thing is often up-to-date within minutes.
- If, indeed, Knol gets favorable treatment in PageRank -- even if its advantage is only slight -- people will soon figure out that it's more profitable to dump 10,000 crappy articles on Knol than to craft one perfect article and keep it updated. The ads will show up anyway. Heck, it might be more profitable to put up a page with poor content and a bunch of ads -- that way frustrated readers will click through on the ads to escape. That's how domain squatting works.
We can certainly look forward to seeing just about every Wikipedia article mirrored on Knol. The software to do that is being written right now; maybe it has already been written. Interestingly, sites filled with ads used to do that to get a lot of PageRank, but I haven't seen any of those sites on a Google search recently. I guess that might change now that Google's getting into the linkjacking business.
Knol is just another case of Google copy pasting other people's products, w/o real care if it succeeds or not. If it does? GREAT! If it doesn't? Well at least we managed to get 20,000,000 page views and got us $500,000 more in ad revenue
If google is able to change the habit to 'xxxx knol', i think google can do anything on the web.
Oh, and the 'confirm name' feature works only for US citizens. Which is probably no big loss, since it mostly looks like a lame excuse to gather even more data about us. But (though I can't confirm this first hand) someone blogged that your Knols only show up on the actual site if you confirm your name.
I'm appalled.
[1] https://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help -- Take a look at the enraged comments, it's amusing.
If people here want to keep this place from turning into a cess pool like just about every other social news site it's up to us to keep crap like this off the front page.
"How to read Russian in 75 minutes" knol at #5 -- but it was created yesterday.
Google does not seem so objective now.
Honesty, integrity, reliability, trust, et al, are values they should not compromise to push their products. We know "don't be evil" is dead, but perhaps be less evil than you are being now.
Google! If you ever see this, bring back the old Google...the Google that created GMail and a damn good search engine.
Given that it's probably impossible to design a simple PageRank algorithm (because it will be gamed, overnight, by SEO experts), and because Google has to keep the algorithm secret anyway (for the same reason), the only reason to trust PageRank is Google's impartiality: Because they're haven't been in the publishing business themselves (at least not conspicuously) they don't have a particular incentive to favor their own content as they tweak the PageRank settings. It's just not possible for Google to become a publisher and still retain consumer confidence in their core product.
Nothing will happen in the short term. Brand erosion is like soil erosion: you don't notice the individual grains trickling downhill, but then you wake up one day and the mountain is missing. There was a time when Yahoo was the king of search, and that time is over for a reason. Early adopters are going to start scanning the skies once again, waiting for the arrival of Google's competition.
Objective or not, Google is giving me the information I am looking for, hence it is behaving exactly as I would want it to.
Most of content on about.com is utter junk: a bunch of bored housewives trying to make a buck are desperate to write something, anything.
Hell, I'm an expert in a few things, and I currently feel far more motivated to write a junky "how to buy X" article than I do to write about anything I actually know.
Try searching for 'search' with Google. Google itself (perhaps the best known search engine) comes in at result #20 -- at the bottom of the second page of search results.
No search results for: engineering, math, computer, internet or transistor. One of Wikipedia's strong points is it's ability to provide not historic information but technical information. Whether it's an mathematical concept, an algorithm or a definition it'll either tell you what you need to know or at least send you in the right direction. Until Knol finds a way to address some of these shortcomings in basic subjects, it will not be on my list of searches.
I can see both sides when in comes to licensing. I think Google's goal is to make experts in the business world participate. It'll be interesting to see what actually ends up happening.
Allowing ads and adsense to encourage posting seems to be equivalent to buying the information. For things that are subjective this is great because you know your moderator and thus the source of the information. But for most subjects, users don't want them moderated one direction or another. Users want to know facts or as unbiased an opinion as possible. Leave it to bloggers to create all those opinion pieces that everyone loves or hates so much.
Well, I'm sold. I'd hate to have something politically incorrect corrupting my precious bodily fluids.
Look at apple. Sure their devices work, but I've heard several people say they bought it because its pretty. also mp3 players were out before ipod. they worked, in a lot of ways, better than ipod. But the apple machine could sell evian to a drowning man, as can the google machine.
AFAIK, Google said they want to organize world's information. They didn't say that those informations cannot be hosted in google.com domain.
Moreover, nobody is forced to use Google, or buy their ads, or click on Knol links in SERPs.
The name sucks. It reminds me of some kind of a lost god
I wouldn't be surprised if they will place Knols even above other search results in SERPS - it's their right to do so and I don't have problems with that.
I think Wikipedia is not threatened by this, since it's rather different service. While Wikipedia is very useful, it also has its flaws, for example it is not really open - entity is not allowed (or even persecuted publicly) for editing entry about itself. I hope Knol will not have such a restriction.
I have been using Wikipedia as my starting point when researching subject I know very little about. In the future I might use two starting points - Wikipedia and Knol. From user perspective, that's only good.