Google Knol is a service rolled out to a selected by-invitation group of people. What Google Knol does is that it allows people/users to contribute to the development of web by generating contents instead of using Google to have more search relevance (which is pretty rare for them to be irrelevant). They says that Knol is different from Wikipedia when a subject matter is written exclusively by authors who possess knowledge on that specific field. Wikipedia on the other hand is free for all to contribute and edit any topic, which normally goes through a Talk page on discussing matters to edit/add on.
Google goes on to say that the contents generated will be hosted and even be allowed to be monetize if you are a contributing author. To determine an article’s accuracy and completeness, users who ain’t contributing will be members of a community which will play the role as rating articles, writing reviews and suggesting edits.
So what Google is trying to do now is going down a path where contents are not generated by the natural flow of internet where the many contents out there does not come from Google, and are segregated throughout the internet sphere. Instead, Google wants to create contents all by itself, and is already been said that it will be indexing it. So now comes the question, “How well are you going to make user’s search results relevant?”
By letting up Knol into the indexing database, this would also mean Knol and Wikipedia’s content will be competing for the first few pages of the search results, just the credibility part for Wikipedia’s contents. As they said Knol will be authored by users who possess knowledge in that particular field, therefore by utilizing PageRank and search result relevancy algorithm, Google will still rank pages accordingly like the next page you are viewing. Should they do otherwise, it could mean a downway slope for Google who prides itself in its powerful “Do No Evil” motto, or are they doing it (silently)?
“Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.” - Udi Manber, VP Engineering of Google
This would imply that they will be ranking pages accordingly to its relevancy and usefulness and deliver the best results to end users. So I guess it’s same to presume that we will still be delivered the same quality of search results out there, and the ones with higher quality, be it Wikipedia, Knol or any other Web-cyclopedia services will be delivered unaltered to end users.
It’s still very new for us to gauge its performance yet, but as you can see, Google is no longer wanting to be top in search technology, but also top in hosting contents for the internet. Perhaps the organic touch of user contributed contents is a powerful method to keep users going on and on using your service, which ultimately benefits everyone, and Google of course, in the end.
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