3 reasons why Wikipedia will kick Knol's Ass.<p>[0] => No ads and it is clean. It is made by people who don't intend to make money, created by people whose world don't revolve around money and read by people who value knowledge more than money.<p>[1] => Wikipedia is millions of pages ahead of Google Knol when it comes to content. 7 million pages in 200 languages. Money can't buy you that.<p>[2] => Wikipedia is synonymous with knowledge but with Google Knol, only the first four letters match, that is the closest it comes to knowledge.<p>I can go on, but will stop here. This is Google's narrow minded way of making money by showing more ads. They clearly were directing lot of traffic to Wikipedia pages, they realized why direct the traffic to some other site when we can let users steal content from Wikipedia and show it in Knol.
What's up with this headline? The original article's headline is "3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia". Changing it to "3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia's ass" is just plain immature and makes HN look like Digg or Reddit. We're talking about two competing companies, not a celebrity boxing match. It certainly makes it less likely anyone is going to take the article, your submissions and comments seriously.<p>If people here want to keep this place from turning into a cess pool like just about every other social news site it's up to us to keep crap like this off the front page.
I checked the article's claim for myself -- "Results 1 - 10 of about 12,700,000 for read russian."<p>"How to read Russian in 75 minutes" knol at #5 -- but it was created yesterday.<p>Google does not seem so objective now.
There is another knol out there, it's called "about.com", and all 3 points the author is making (including high pagerank) isn't working for them.<p>Most of content on about.com is utter junk: a bunch of bored housewives trying to make a buck are desperate to write something, anything.
I just looked at knol. It seems to be set up in such a way that it will encourage the creation of junk adword-magnet articles ("how to buy a hi-fi system", "how to find a personal injury lawyer in the state of Michigan") rather than the creation of truly high-quality articles by experts.<p>Hell, I'm an expert in a few things, and I currently feel far more motivated to write a junky "how to buy X" article than I do to write about anything I actually know.
Google can't be subjective, its on a freaking google subdomain. Search engines do treat subdomains as seperate new pages (with little ranking effect from the domain) it still on google.com which makes it golden, then Im sure mattcutts.com/blog and other googlers blog roll is pointed to it - its done, a page on knol will soon rank higher than a page with exact same content on wikipedia.
I agree completely with you Joop. The killer feature here is that users can get a substantial pay from their articles if Google keeps on ranking them high. However this could also be its downfall.
Seriously! This gets to HN top stories? <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256481" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256481</a> is way better reserched.
Well lets go over a handful of things Knol is missing.<p>No search results for: engineering, math, computer, internet or transistor. One of Wikipedia's strong points is it's ability to provide not historic information but technical information. Whether it's an mathematical concept, an algorithm or a definition it'll either tell you what you need to know or at least send you in the right direction. Until Knol finds a way to address some of these shortcomings in basic subjects, it will not be on my list of searches.<p>I can see both sides when in comes to licensing. I think Google's goal is to make experts in the business world participate. It'll be interesting to see what actually ends up happening.<p>Allowing ads and adsense to encourage posting seems to be equivalent to buying the information. For things that are subjective this is great because you know your moderator and thus the source of the information. But for most subjects, users don't want them moderated one direction or another. Users want to know facts or as unbiased an opinion as possible. Leave it to bloggers to create all those opinion pieces that everyone loves or hates so much.
>This approach takes people out of anonymity and potential incorrect contributions<p>Well, I'm sold. I'd hate to have something politically incorrect corrupting my precious bodily fluids.
What you guys fail to see is that sure the product alreadfy exists. for scholars and techies wikipedia is great. But the text-driven presentation doesnt draw the regular joe who looks at presentation over function.<p>Look at apple. Sure their devices work, but I've heard several people say they bought it because its pretty. also mp3 players were out before ipod. they worked, in a lot of ways, better than ipod. But the apple machine could sell evian to a drowning man, as can the google machine.
I welcome Knol, in my opinion this move from Google is well within their mission of organizing world's information - they are creating platform for experts organizing their knowledge on google-hosted servers. Isn't About.com and others doing the same?<p>I wouldn't be surprised if they will place Knols even above other search results in SERPS - it's their right to do so and I don't have problems with that.<p>I think Wikipedia is not threatened by this, since it's rather different service. While Wikipedia is very useful, it also has its flaws, for example it is not really open - entity is not allowed (or even persecuted publicly) for editing entry about itself. I hope Knol will not have such a restriction.<p>I have been using Wikipedia as my starting point when researching subject I know very little about. In the future I might use two starting points - Wikipedia and Knol. From user perspective, that's only good.