Google Knol Project
I was scanning my newest Social Networking addiction Seesmic where I watched mndoci (aka Deepak Singh) talk about a new Google project named Knol and it sounded interesting so I google'd it but it seems that this is not one of their normal "beta test it openly forever" projects. It's actually closed for the time being. The premise appears to be that Knol will allow experts to maintain a page about the topic or item they are expert in and they will retain complete editing authority over that page:
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. ... snip ... A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.
So knols will be given higher priority for a search result on a given topic (at least that's how I read the second part) and multiple knols will be allowed and, I assume, tracked by Google since they will be sharing revenue. This gives authors an incentive to stay up on the topic and to remain up in the search results - higher presence equals more money. Now isn't that a SEO's wet dream? Heck, I wonder how Google will be able to keep PR hacks out of the system and gaming a page to offer "expertise" enough on a subject to be relevant but also have enough internal linking to their clients to pass on that google-juice. But still a big question is why now? What does Google gain from this new service? While I agree with most of what Deepak is saying in his blog, I think this quote from his post skirts past the actual reason for Google to do this:
Obviously Wikipedia does put some holes in my theory, but even Wikipedia becomes relevant only when people link to it. So Google’s new move is interesting. IMO, it’s value comes into play in scenarios similar to the one on Wikipedia and Science. In other words, algorithms find information while the human filter provides expertise. Google plans to share revenue with authors as well, which seems to be their differentiator from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is starting to get more and more hits that are in the top 5 and that means more people are going to Wikipedia and not to a site that runs Google Adwords. This is the core of Google's revenue and whenever the dust settles after any Google activity it always seems to be the projects that push click-thrus are the ones that stay around. EDIT: Need to give a "shout out" to insurgent - our chat over on irc.wyldryde.org lead to the thinking behind this post.