Dec
14th
Fri
14th
Google announced last night they are starting a project called knol that will allow anyone to create wiki-like pages on topics. In particular, Google is encouraging people who know a particular subject to write an “authoritative” article about it. The search engine will not vet any of the content, however, they will prioritize the most credible entries and rank them first in search results. It remains unclear how Google is measuring credibility - a scary thought. Still, with this move Google is clearly targeting Wikipedia (which is perhaps their biggest rival) and quite possibly is trying to ensure that Jimmy Wales’ forthcoming social search engine, Wikia, is dead on arrival. Consider the timing of this announcement. It comes just days before Wikia is set to launch in beta and when Google doesn’t even have any site we can poke at. My initial take on this is that knols are going to kill Wikipedia - but it will take time. This theory, however, hinges on whether people actually start creating knols, but I believe they will. Here are several reasons why Wikipedia and Wikia are dead …
