Google Knol

By Aditya Mhatre at 15 December, 2007, 4:34 am

Knol, a unit of Knowldege is Google�s latest product. According to Google, any user can create a page on any subject that they are specialized in. I am sure you have a thought bubble pop up saying �err� that�s Wikipedia�. You are not wrong. Well, actually it is more like Squidoo. In fact Google will pay the contributors on Knol. How? Through Google Adsense. Each Knol contributor will be paid when ever someone clicks on the ads that their page hosts. The contributor can choose not to have ads on their Knol page. Only the �owner� of the page can edit the page information but reader can review/rate the page information.

Moreover this is bad news for wikipedia. Wikipedia gets majority of its traffic from Google search . Now, if google has its own competing products, will we see knol links instead? Wikipedia has on more than one occasion refused to use Google ads through which Google could have made a significant amount of green. I could make an argument that since Wikipedia wasn�t willing to play ball, Google decided to come up with their own competing product. Why else would Google come up with such a product

I have been getting a very eerie feeling about Google for quite sometime now. They seems to be moving away from their �Do No Evil� motto with a lot of their new products. Google has maintained that they are content aggregators through their search product but now are steadily getting into content creation business as well. Why? To sell ads! I feel a bit disappointed that its no more about providing value. Agreed, that�s how they earn money but where is the value addition that Google has been known to provide.

Knol is everything that Wikipedia is not. My gut tells me that Knol is going to fail big time because the product is not done in the right spirit. The spirit of Wikipedia is to spread knowledge and Knol�s core is to create web real estate to carry Google ads.

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Categories : Technology