Is it failing? I think it's a little late for that question. More like "why did it fail?"<p>I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your net wide, devote a small amount of resources to a bunch of products and hope some of them take off. That's what Knol is part of and that's fine. Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.<p>Given that I consider articles like this to be exactly the level of mockery they deserve.
<i>Why Google's online encyclopedia will never be as good as Wikipedia</i><p><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2200401" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/id/2200401</a>
God, I hope they shut it down. It was immediately populated by SEO freaks who kept looking at PR flowing from a google.com domain. And it made me feel like I had to do it, and I hate doing shit purely for SEO reasons.
Google just needs to downrank Wikipedia a little and it fails. I guess Google Knol will sooner or later rank above Wikipedia. We all know that Eric Schmidt has denied that "don't be evil" has been ever an official motto of his corporation.