Will Google Knol kill off Wikipedia?

January 3, 2008

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If you don’t know about the “new” project of Google called Knol which you is the following taken from Google Blog:

The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal…

You can read the whole article here.

I will be happy if Google can decrease the ranking of Wikipedia in some of the terms that really don’t help. But also not ranking Google Knol which I can guess that will be the same. Here are some webmasters thought about this issue:

Don’t think so – I am generally not impressed by the quality of Web 2.0 projects that rely on people working for nothing. This works well for wikipedia, because people do it “for a good cause” (making knowledge accessible to everybody) and because nobody makes money on it. But why should you do it for google? I think it is more likely that YouTube will fade to insignificance rather than Google Knol will perform very well.

The reason you might want to contribute to knol is twofold if I read the article correctly. Fistly, unlike wiki, your name will be published. If I can get the name of my websites appearing in knol then that makes me happy (financially happy I hope).

Second, the article says that adverts can be put on the pages and the author gets a cut of the revenue. Thinking about that, it sounds good. If I get a few articles in knol, the income from the ads has the potential to be good.

It seems that Google is attempting to challenge wiki with a similar version of wiki but monetising it with ads. Is that good? Don’t know, but it sure beats having wiki web pages appearing as number 1 in the serps with me getting absolutely nothing from it. Those wiki articles are relegating my pages to a number 2 slot.

Could KNOL go the same way as DMOZ? People creating MFK articles, and then attempting to become official reviewers?

What I find disheartening is that Google still gives the impression of a being a company run by geeks, rather than being professionally managed. I would expect something of Google’s size to have a corporate website, with links to foreign language sites, products, corporate news, product status, etc. In short a site from which it would be possible to navigate to anywhere within the Google world. But it’s a hodgepodge of sites and blogs which to me seems very unprofessional and reflects badly on the way Google is organized. The way this announcement has been handled is a case in point.

Count me as a skeptic, for two reasons:

1) Google will be competing with significant numbers of high-traffic sites that have already built communities of contributors: e.g., Wikipedia and other wikis, “experts” sites, TripAdvisor, and so on. Granted, there may be some migration of contributors from other sites to whatever’s currently new and cool, but what’s to keep fickle contributors from losing interest and wandering off when something else becomes new and cool?

2) Knol is a sideshow for Google (at best), and I have to wonder whether Google has the long-term commitment to make it work and keep it working. Unlike, say, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, or Suite101.com, Google’s reputation and very existence don’t depend on committing the resources and energy to make the idea a success.

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