Professional SEO | Internet Marketing

Google Knol is a free online collaborative knowledge database or an experts' wiki but not an encyclopedia. Knol is not a direct competitor of Wikipedia, at least not in its current version. Wikipedia is anonymous -- there is no single editor in charge. In contrast, Knol includes the author name in the URL of the article. Google expects multiple knols on one subject rather than the current Wikipedia model of one article on a subject. The term "knol" ("unit of knowledge") refers to both the project and an article in the project.

More specifically, Google says Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. The company first announced Knol late last year, and instead of populating its databases with articles from everyone, Google kept Knol an invitation-only party -- until now.

Right now, a lot of the existing Knols – Google defines a knol as a "unit of knowledge”, and perhaps this will be how people name articles hosted on Knol too – deal with subjects of a more serious or scientific nature, like health. Google's help page says you can write "(Almost) anything you like,” adding that you pick the subject "and write it the way you see fit” as they don't edit knols nor do they "try to enforce any particular viewpoint” subject to the terms of service and their content policy, which disallows e.g[.] images containing nudity, and "spam,” a rather broad term in this case.

Google's Knol is an attempt to harness the vast forests of knowledge trapped inside people's heads and make it more widely available via the Web. Rather than the often anonymous group effort that makes up a Wikipedia article entry, Knol seeks to pull out that knowledge primarily from one specific head.

Moves by Google into mobile phones with Android and the bid for mobile spectrum in the United States should be welcomed, because they bring new competition into a traditional market; likewise Google's attempts to break into radio and TV advertising. Knol on the other hand brings the power of Google into a marketplace that is already rich with competition, and a marketplace where Google can use its might to crush that competition by favoring pages from Knol over others, on what is the worlds most popular search engine.

Google are also looking to have Knol references put in Wikipedia. If that happens, which is likely if the quality of Knols is high, then it will migrate people away from Wikipedia and towards Knol use. If the information is more reliable then this can't be viewed as a bad migration.

Looks like a fantasy scenario, but it is not that much of a stretch. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has been conduction some tests with Knol pages, and the results are surprising. of all the Knol pages that he created for test pages were ranking on the first page of Google's results after one day.

On the more consumer side, Google could use the atomized bits of knowledge (knols) created by authors to fuel a more semantically rich Web of connections. With tags, ratings, comments and other rich metadata and Semantic Web technologies, or even just the statistical approach Google prefers, knols could provide a framework for more complex and even natural language queries

Some new publishers decide to license their work via Creative Commons (hoping to be paid back based on the links economy), but Google wants no part in that! All outbound links on Knol are nofollow, so even if a person wants to give you credit for your work Google makes it impossible to do so.

While Wikipedia and Knol share some attributes, Google is a business, so where's the money? Authors can -- at their discretion -- sign up with Google's AdSense program, let Google serve up advertisements next to their Knols, and possibly earn some revenue for sharing their knowledge.

This is not to say that all of Knol will be spam. Indeed, it's likely that the prominence of having content within a Google-hosted service may attract some outstanding authors. Manber certainly expect this, saying that he hopes content is created that will be so good that Google itself will rank it tops in searches.