Seeker Blog

The Knol project isn’t public yet — here’s some tidbits:

Google recently announced Knol, a new experimental website that puts information online in a way that encourages authorial attribution. Unlike articles for the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which anyone is free to revise, Knol articles will have individual authors, whose pictures and credentials will be prominently displayed alongside their work. Currently, participation in the project is by invitation only, but Google will eventually open up Knol to the public. At that point, a given topic may end up with multiple articles by different authors. Readers will be able to rate the articles, and the better an article’s rating, the higher it will rank in Google’s search results.

Google coined the term “knol” to denote a unit of knowledge but also uses it to refer to an authoritative Web-based article on a particular subject. At present, Google will not describe the project in detail, but Udi Manber, one of the company’s vice presidents of engineering, provided a cursory sketch on the company’s blog site. “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,” Manber writes. And in a departure from Wikipedia’s model of community authorship, he adds that “the key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors.”

[more]

And from the Google blog:

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 (double-click on the image 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.

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