Comments on: Google's Knols: Will These End Up in Our Search Results?

By: WebWorkerDaily » Archive Google’s Knol: Not Perfect, But Better as it Grows Up «

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:00:24 +0000

[...] 29th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean No Comments A little while back, I wrote a post about Google’s Knol site, which was initially announced in December of 2007. A Knol is [...]

By: Mike Gale

Mike Gale — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:01:41 +0000

This fits very well with some of the basic themes of Google. They are focused on getting value from other people’s contributions without paying them. (Just look at search where you have to opt out of caching, grabbing library contents with OCR, even when in copyright…)

This is closer to the original ideas of Jimmy Wales et. al. that eventually crystallised out as Wikipedia. It shares problems that those guys had.

Given the fact that Wikipedia has problems, and people now know about the general idea, it might gain more traction than you’d otherwise expect.

From the description (I’ve not checked it out yet) it’s what a lot of people are already doing with blogs with a couple of differences, like an absence of mind-numbingly vacuous comments. People are kinda already trained.

Given that web content had degraded over the last 7 to 10 years it might help raise quality. I think Google needs to be very cautious about dishonestly elevating the results though. Their advertising behaviour is questionable and that would further fuel a backlash.

By: VENKATAKRISHNA NALAMOTHU

VENKATAKRISHNA NALAMOTHU — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:45:58 +0000

Knols will definitely become more popular than Wikipedia mainly due to its personalisation feature and Google brand. Every author generally desires to have his/her name be placed prominently. I like Knol more than Wikipedia even though it is too early to compare them.