Google Knol
12/13/2007 06:01:00 PM
Originally posted by Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Google
"The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. 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. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.
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. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest.
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.
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."
Knol beta
Ok folks, the knol beta has been going for few days now...
The first 'knol'
Knol news
Updated every 30 minutes
- Google Lively no longer
- The cut led media reports to speculate on whether Google may choose to cut other community type projects, such as Knol , Orkat, and Jaiku, because of the ...
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- Google Gets Wiki
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Knol blogs
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- Are your trying to train your dog hard but not yielding the results you would expect? Changes are, you did overlook small mistakes that makes training your dog a harder task.
- Term Paper For Free's New Clothes - Knol Stuff
- Hey everyone, After a long night of work, I finally re-designed my Free Termpaper site - www.termpaperforfree.com. The new site's in Joomla, and is totally Web 2.0ish :) The site is totally free, enjoy its free term papers, ...
- Graduate Studies & Research - Knol Stuff
- Graduate Thesis is a write up that talk about any specific topic. Irrespective of word limit a Graduate Thesis can be written on any topic whether it is related to science, arts or any other subject. Students are required to write ...
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- People are learning more and more about the need to take care of their bodies. We take vitamins and antioxidants, we hear about the benefits of good food instead of fast food, and we hire personal trainers or buy gym memberships so we ...
Knol links
- Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge
- Encouraging people to contribute knowledge 12/13/2007 06:01:00 PM Posted by Udi Manber, VP EngineeringThe web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good...
- Google Introduces the ‘Knol’
- Another entrant into the Ken Rutkowski, Jason Calacanis and Eric Schmidt's definition of Web 3.0 has come to light. Google ...
- Google shoots for Wikipedia from Knol - The INQUIRER
- The enquirer.
- Google Knol: A Step Too Far?
- News broke late yesterday that Google was preparing to launch a new site call Knol that will combine parts of Wikipedia and Squidoo ...
- Google Knol
- Friday, December 14, 2007Google Knol“Knol”, just announced a the official Google blog, is a currently private, invitation-only knowledge sharing service. Google says that a Knol is a “unit of knowledge,"* and in the style of the old-school About.com website, experts are invited to
- "knol" citation from Double-Tongued Dictionary
- knol: 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.…At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instanc
- Google’s Death Knol For Some? - GigaOM
- GigaOM
- Tech Beat Google's Knol: No Wikipedia Killer - BusinessWeek
- Business week.
- BetaNews | Perspective: I don't Knol
- BetaNews Home.
- Google puts Wikipedia in the crosshairs with Knol - Download Squad
- Download SquadWeb
Google puts Wikipedia in the crosshairs with Knol.
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Google Knol
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Hope to see you again soon...
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