Questions About Google Knol

Since the initial announcement from Google about their Knol project I have been reading the discussions to try and clear up some thoughts. If you don’t know Knol yet, here is how they described it:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

It seems I have more questions than answers, in particular the following three:

  1. More or less trustworthy than Wikipedia? – Google is pushing the fact that authors will get full credit for their content, so there are both advertising revenue and ego benefits. At the same time though they say:

    Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

    So potentially Google is going to rank something, with the Google good name attached, that is no more reliable than any other content on the web (ie. not). At least at Wikipedia you can go in and try to edit something that is incorrectly claimed about yourself or your company, it’s not clear what recourse you will have in this case.

    Despite any disclaimers, you know there will be people who say “it’s from Google, it must be true”. Hopefully as well as having alternative points of view they have a way to make it clear these are just opinions.

  2. Wikipedia dupe content? – As Techcrunch say, Knol will show advertising, which will attract lots of Wikipedia contributors, but also as they point out Wikipedia content is free to copy:

    Very soon we are going to see a lot of Wikipedia content moving wholesale to Knol. Wikipedia content is basically free to use, redistribute, copy, whatever, under the GNU license

    How much of Knol is going to be dupe content, and as this is a Google product, will any of this copy and paste content outrank the original?

  3. SEO heaven or hell? – Which brings us to my final question. If Knol ranks, and especially if it outranks will it turn out to be a spam magnet and a draw for SEO’s looking for a ranking leg-up?

What do you think? Is Knol going to cause spam and plagiarism, or will it be great for competition and users?

Posted on December 25, 2007 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Google

Comments

2 Responses to “Questions About Google Knol”

  1. Nathan Ketsdever on December 31st, 2007 2:35 pm

    I can’t imagine a world in which spam isn’t part and parcel of knol, unless Google does a great job of checking it (and its explicitly outruled in the terms of service)

  2. Chris Garrett on January 1st, 2008 1:32 pm

    Yeah I think even if the TOS excludes it there will be some spamsploits

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