What’s in a Knol?
July 24th, 2008 by Davor
We got a sneaky peel at Google’s Knol today. If you are unfamiliar with Knol let me give you the 2 minute overview in non geek terms.
Knol is the word coined by the big brains at Google to describe their own rival to Wikipedia or Yahoo! answers etc. It it’s also the term for pages held within the site and will be used to describe one unit of knowledge within Knol itself.
Google vice president of engineering, Udi Manber is heading up the Knol project and he reckons it will help searchers by creating information on subjects that aren’t particularly well covered on the internet already. Unlike Wikipedia Google Knol users and authors would require to log in to edit content. Indeed Manber believes that:
“Knol is all about the authors. We believe that knowing who wrote a knol will significantly help users make better use of web content.”
Google will give no preferential; treatment to Knol pages; if they rank well in SERP’s then they rank well because they compete algorithmically. There will be no leg ups.
Knol authors can link to other sites and as it stands links might not be nofollow tagged, thus allowing lovely page rank and authority to flow from Knol pages to other web pages. Obviously SEO’s will love the link popularity that comes with this!
As ever with Google money plays its part. Knol pages will display (sometimes!) relevant adverts from Google’s adsense network. The revenues attributed to these pages are shared with the Knol author. This could be more than a little difficult to manage as others can edit content if given permission by the author.
In the past services in a similar vein have found themselves full of spam, has Google opened themselves up to a whole raft of content that they won’t particularly want?
Mmmmmmm?? It’s a big step from Google, moving from being a tool to find information too being a content host has many potential pitfalls and I’m sure we’ll all watch to see how this one plays out.
PS. I reckon I’m not alone in thinking that there will be a whole lot of Knol authors who are experts on Insurance, Loans, Mortgages, Credit Cards, Mobile Phones, Flights, Holidays, IPod’s, and maybe even shock horror Viagra and Porn!!
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