Google is trying to compete with Wikipedia with its new Knols Project. We don’t know how successful it will be as we have seen Google Video and Youtube before.
But one thing is for sure, Google is trying to get into the Wiki business. (Knol Project is very similar to our QuarterWiki, OneBuckWiki, EntreWiki, FiveDollarWiki, and other wikis that we are developing right now.)
The interface does look pretty neat from the screenshot here:
What amazes us is that we are trying to build the largest commercialized Wiki with our new QuarterWiki but Google is also making similar site. We don’t intend to compete with Google of course, but we think we are going in the right direction if the Big Guy thinks so too.
You can get to the new Knols Project login by going here:
https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=knol
But unless you got an invite, you can’t access it. Does anyone want to give us an invite? We’d like to incorporate Knols’ features on our paid wiki sites before Knols’ launch date. Lol…we are being too honest here huh?
Here’s what the Google Knol Project is briefly about:
Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.
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. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.
We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.
As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an example of a knol is below (click on the image twice to see the page in full). The main content is real, and we encourage you to read it (you may sleep better afterwards!), but most of the meta-data — like reviews, ratings, and comments — are not real, because, of course, this has not been in the public eye as yet. Again, this is a preliminary version.
