Google’s Knol A Wikipedia Killer?

Google launched a new service - Knol - a few days ago, in an apparent attempt to take on the knowledge database Wikipedia.

A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.

A knol is branded as a unit of knowledge. With their new tool Google will provide similar functionality to what Wikipedia already provides. Additionally, they utilize phone verification to help improve expert authenticity and reduce spam, they have a cool WYSIWYG editor, and you can plugin your adsense code and earn revenue generated from your articles.

Additionally, Knol allows you to invite friends to participate in and contribute to your articles.

One bad move as far as I am concerned is that Google do not own Knol.com. Wouldn’t they try and acquire this domain name? The domain and website is owned by a Dutch company selling vacuum cleaners and other appliances. That will certainly be a lot of free publicity and traffic for Knol.com!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under Domain News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Google’s Knol A Wikipedia Killer?”

Scott
July 26th, 2008 at 12:11 pm

Knol does not require you to cite your sources. This is a big deal.

Also, Knol will have LOADS of duplicate content as there isn’t just one spot for a topic. It will be like this:

Bob Smith/domaining
John Thompson/domaining
Tim Johnson/domaining

This will lead to duplicate content and there is no guarantee that you will land on a good “Domaining.”
yaph
July 26th, 2008 at 7:45 pm

I don’t think knol will ever be a serious competitor for wikipedia. SEOs will use knol to spread links and maybe some people who work for educational institutions will publish a few useful articles. I guess the lifetime of knoll will be rather short.
RKB
July 26th, 2008 at 11:53 pm

So far google has launched many sites similar to the other famous sites, but they have not hit the number 1 spot with most of them.

I am not sure they can kill Wikipedia with Knol.

I guess time will tell….

Thanks,

DNBlogger
Jamie
July 27th, 2008 at 1:23 pm

I think if it is heavily regulated it may work.. as of yesterday there were 1200 KNOL’s currently indexed…

So it’s getting love from the G.. but will it handle the immense pressure it’s going to be under?.. It’s going to be interesting..

Ace blog BTW.. bookmarked

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