Jan
2008
Google is now planning to commence an innovative effort to capture human knowledge on the internet. This new initiative, “Google Knol”, is presently undergoing its testing phase. This would be an innovative ‘Web-publishing approach’ that is drawing comparisons to Wikipedia, according to Google.A “knol,” according to Google, is an individual segment of information or knowledge. This innovative concept of a new publishing platform is running in trials and tests in the hands of selected individuals who have been invited to take part in a beta version, the search giant said in a statement recently.
“The aim of ‘Knol’ is to help bring some order to the vast amount of human knowledge being shared online”, said Udi Manber, Vice President of Engineering at Google.
The internet is like an ocean of information, and Google is attempting to fathom this information by providing pretty good search facilities. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it”.
“The challenge posed to us by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt was to find a way to help people share their knowledge,” Udi Manber noted. “This is our main goal.”
Focusing On Authors
‘Knol’ will differ from Wikipedia , the open encyclopedia that invites users to submit content and then opens them up to continued editing and updating by others. The difference between the two would a focus on one key aspect, the author.” The authors of ‘knolls’ will be heavily featured”, said Google.
The basic idea behind the ‘Knol’ project would be to highlight ‘Knols-Authors’. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, and scientific articles always have authors. Somehow the web-world evolved without standard notions to keep authors names highlighted. Udi Manber says. “We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content”.
Another difference the ‘Google Knol’ would be demonstrating would also be related with the authors and this time it is related with their income opportunities. The author will have the opportunity to make money from writing ‘knols’. Displaying the Google Ads on their ‘knols’ would not be mandatory for the authors but doing so will offer them a unique opportunity to generate and share the ad-revenue.
Google will be providing a working platform, hosting and tools for designing and writing the ‘knol-pages’ to the authors and will not edit or censor the pages. The main objective is to make each knol “the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read,” added Udi Manber. Google will not endorse the content on ‘Knol’ pages but will help move pages that it deems worthy up the rankings in search results.”We do not want to build a walled garden of content. We want to disseminate it as widely as possible,” says Udi Manber. Google will not ask for any exclusiveness on any of the knol’s content and will make that content available to any other search engine.
A New Landing for Advertisements
Experts are of the view that this new initiative of Google may prompt people to question whether Google has strayed too far from its search roots. “The Knol project fits with other efforts to organize what is otherwise scattered information”, Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Charlene Li said.
Knol would be a base project of Google and it would require making the splash in the classifieds and miscellaneous information space. If this becomes a successful venture, it will revolutionalize the web content scenario.
“More content means more places to deliver ads to and the more specialized it is, the more advertisers will be interested in it”, Charlene Li said.
Experiences Lead to Further Challenges
Google has its previous experiences of leveraging human knowledge in the search context. In the beginning of the year 2007 Google discontinued its attempts with “Google Answers”. The company accepted that it has learned plenty from the two-plus years it ran the service which required that users pay for answers and would incorporate that knowledge into future products.
This time Google has high expectations from high value creators and high value advertisers both. Users will submit pages to the new service and this would extend a potential and abundant new landscape to populate with advertising. The ‘knol’ pages will be focused on specific topics, and this in turn would certainly be a nice opportunity to attract relatively high-value advertising. Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling says,” “If it takes off, you can certainly see applications for local content and advertising,”
Becoming successful would be a big challenge for Google’s Knol project. Existing platforms like blogs and other websites still could be a continued choice and preference for majority of the users. People may choose to keep their knowledge and content limited to these resources only.
Wikipedia still remains one of the heavily visited web community. It is constantly trying to raise editorial standards to ensure content is accurate but it continues to roll under fire for spreading misinformation often.
Many experts and bloggers feel that Google may have to face an uphill task attempting distinguishing its new offering from its own blogging tools or the existing and already widely popular Wikipedia.
