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Dec. 17, 2007

Today the Internet certainly represents a staggering amount of data. Over the past few years, Google has done an amazing job at finding that information. However, not everything is readily accessible and isn't always organized in the best manner.

Now Google wants to help people share both their knowledge and some of that data among each other. But as can be expected, this is an enormous task at best.

On Dec. 12, Google started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that they are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge.

However, Google wants to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind its new initiative.

Overall, Google wants to encourage users who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it, in a similar way that Wikipedia has done until today.

Google's new tool is still in development and it will begin its first phase of testing sometime in January or February. For the time being, using it is by invitation only.

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, etc.

Knols will include powerful community tools, and 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. And this is what has the blogging community excited.

Google was quick to point out that it dosen't want to build a "walled garden of content". Instead, it wishes 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 that wants it.

Also, Google won't be editing the content in any way, and won't "bless it" either. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. Google hopes that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line.

To that end, 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, according to Google.

Once Google has completed its testing, participation in knols will be open, and Google won't expect that all knols will be of high quality. Google's job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in its search results.

Google feels reasonably confident that it will be up to the challenge, and is very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

Google's main concept behind its inovative "knol" project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover. By the same token, news articles have bylines and scientific articles always have authors, but somehow the Internet evolved without a very strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.

Google somehow believes that correctly identifying and ackowledging just who wrote what will greatly help users make better use of the content.

In its most basic form, a knol is simply a Web page. Google uses the word "knol" as the name of its project and as an instance of an article interchangeably.

Google wants to make sure that this will be well-organized, nicely presented, and will have a distinctive look and feel.

The search giant will provide easy-to-use tools for writing and editing, and it will provide free hosting of the content.

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    This article was featured on Business 5.0.

Source: Google