Search and advertising giant Google is developing a user-generated online encyclopaedia that could rival Wikipedia.
Google has named the scheme the "knol project", a knol being a "unit of knowledge", according to a blog post by Google engineering vice president Udi Manber. The company aims to tie strong identities to contributing authors and those seeking to edit knols.
"Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," wrote Manber. "The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions."
Google will host and provide tools to produce and edit knol web pages, but will not edit or advocate any of the content. However, entries that Google judges to be of higher quality will be given a higher page ranking in Google search.
Entries will be rated by the community and will be able to be reviewed after the unspecified testing period. The project is currently in beta and has been sent to a small group of testers. Once the knol tool goes live, contributors will be able to monetise their pages by including Google ads.
Talkback
That's a million dollar ripoff from paid wikis which are similar in that there's one author and author's can advertise.
Here a list of them:
http://quarterwiki.com
http://milliondollarwiki.com
http://onebuckwiki.com
People add entries to Wikipedia because they're genuinely interested in the subject, Knol is trying to give them an incentive. They might get a few quality entries but they won't kill Wikipedia, most will be spammers or information copied from some other place, even wikipedia itself.
Also there's a suspision that Google won't be entirely neutral in ranking content from Knol vs. content from other sites. I hope am wrong!
So true harpless,
Looks like the big 'G' is running out of ideas and starting to reproduce (rip-off) anything that becomes popular or ubiquitous.
Their attampt will most probably end up as another info-rubbish site!
Incidentally, did you notice that quaterwiki has already sold 726 pages for a paltry $181.50!!! Hardly worth it, eh?
TFD
Even though it appears to be wiki format, is this a Google attempt at trying to steal some of Yahoo! Answers thunder?
Very easy to copy and paste someone else's work and make it your own.