Google’s Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation

After six months
of testing, Google has formally rolled out
Knol, a service designed to let
people create pages of knowledge on any topic they choose. While Google says
Knol is not designed to compete with Wikipedia — and there are good
arguments to back this up — I still think the easiest way to describe the
service is Wikipedia with moderation. Below, more about this, the service in
general, and some of the issues it may raise for Google.

As many are aware, Wikipedia allows anyone to create and edit pages on
all types of topics. Need to know about the BS 546 electrical plug used by
old houses in Britain? I once did, and the Wikipedia community has created a
page about the topic.

The collaborative advantage to Wikipedia is also its disadvantage. Since
anyone can
contribute, some introduce factual errors or overtly
vandalize articles (see
George Washington
Did What According To Wikipedia???). It’s one reason that Wikipedia is

considering moderation.

Like Wikipedia, Knol (unlike many other Google products, officially it’s
just "Knol," not "Google Knol") allows anyone to create a page about any
topic. By default, new pages are set to use "moderated collaboration," which
means anyone can contribute to them but additions only go live after the
page’s main author or authors allow the contributions to be added.

It’s a nice idea. Potentially, it helps solve issues like vandalism yet
allows for a broad group of people to contribute. It also is a chief
argument in favor of why Google even needs to introduce a tool like Knol, that it is providing what will likely be a robust authoring tool with a
unique set of features.

Building A Knol

Creating a Knol is easy. You simply click on the "Write A Knol" button on
the home page, and then you get to a page authoring tool with options such
as:

• Title: This serves as the main headline of your page
   
• Affiliation: This option was added based on the feedback of medical professionals,
  who form the bulk of those who have privately tested Knol. They wanted people to list any relevant affiliations that
  might be seen as conflicts of interest. Personally, I think calling this a
  "bio line" might make more sense. It’s not required.
   
• Summary: A summary of what the article is about.

There’s also a main body field, of course. Within this, you can do basic
formatting of code, insert links (all which are supposed to be nofollow,
Google says), and more. There’s no particular style that a knol has to
follow, in terms of fonts, page headings or so on.

Right now, you can’t add embedded content such as YouTube
videos or maps. It’s mainly a security issue at the moment, Cedric Dupont,
the product manager for Knol, told me. If Knol allows embedded code, malware could get in. They’re exploring the
best way to do this going forward. But what about other Google authoring
tools like Blogger or Page Creator that can handle embeds? These tools are
using their own unique code, and Google wants to develop common code that
allows safe embeds for Knol and other Google properties.

Managing Settings

After you’ve created a knol, you can modify its settings using the
"Manage" tab at the top of the knol page. This is where you can:

• Control Collaboration: Allow anyone to contribute without
  moderation, allow contributions but only with approval, or keep it only
  open to authors.
   
• Set Sharing License: You can license your knol for others to
  use via Creative Commons. But what’s annoying is that if you use something like the "attribution"
  option, there’s no way to indicate exactly what you consider to be fair
  attribution (Flickr is the same way). In other words, it’s great that you can
  say the work can be shared if attributed in a manner specified. But if
  someone follows the help
  page to learn
  more about licensing your work, there’s nothing on it that says where to
  find the exact attribution the author wants.
   
• Enable Ads: Yes, Knol will have ads, at launch from Google
  AdSense. If you already have an AdSense, you can enable it. Don’t have
  one? Knol stands ready to set you up. Yes, Google is considering letting
  ads from others appear on these pages, but there are no immediate plans
  for this.
   
• Control Owners: Decide who can administer the knol.
   
• Control Authors: Decide who can edit and modify the knol’s
  content.
   
• Invite Reviewers: If you’re building a knol that hasn’t been
  published, this allows you to let others see it.
   
• Unpublish/Delete: Allows you to pull a knol from public view if
  you published it already or delete it entirely.

Being Seen

I said earlier that there are some ways Knol is not like Wikipedia. One
example of this is that there’s no table of contents or category structure on
the Knol home page to let you drill down into entries. Instead, if you want to find
something, by and large you have to search for it using the search box on
the site.

At first I thought this odd, but then it made a lot of sense. I certainly
never go to the Wikipedia home page to browse my way to a Wikipedia entry. Usually,
I get to an entry by searching for the topic (and typically from having done that search on Google itself).

The Knol home page does have some "Featured" knols on it.
What puts them there? Among the various signals Google uses are how long
people browse particular pages, how highly they are rated, commenting
activity and more. These same signals are also used to help rank pages in
response to keyword searches.

Importance Of The Author

Another way knol is different from Wikipedia is that it is designed to
have a heavy focus on a particular author. That’s something Google
emphasized about Knol when it was
first announced
last December.
From my interview then with Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber:

"Knol is all about the authors," he said. "We believe that knowing who
wrote a knol will significantly help users make better use of web
content."

You can see the emphasis reflected in both the author box at the top
right of each page and Google’s attempt to "verify" that an author is who
they say they are.

For example, with Twitter, popular author Seth Godin doesn’t actually
twitter using the sethgodin name.

Someone else does. Knol seeks to solve this by at least determining if
someone’s "real life" name matches what they’re using on Knol.

To do this, authors are invited to "Verify Name" using a button under
their picture. Verification can be done through cell phone, as Google can
match names to mobile phone records, apparently. Do this, and you get a PIN
code sent to your phone to complete the process.

Verizon subscribers are out of luck, as might be others (it didn’t work
for me using AT&T). As an
alternative, you can provide a credit card number. I did a double-take at
this. Google, which faces so much pressure in some quarters that it is
gathering too much information, is asking for credit card numbers? I know, I
know, all the usual "we won’t use this for other things" reassurances are
given — and I believe them. But still, it just seems a bad idea to try it
this way if only from the negative public perception that might result.

Spam & Ranking Domination Issues

Google’s Blogger service has become a well-known haven for spammers (and
the relaunched
Google Sites program

just got attention for hosting Viagra spam).
Things have greatly improved over the past years, but it’s still a problem.
What’s to keep Google’s Knol from becoming another spam repository?

The refreshingly honest answer was that Google does expect there will be
spam in Knol. But Google said it also expects to keep this in
control by watching for it very closely, noting that since Knol is a product
from Google’s

search quality team, that team has a lot of experience in detecting
search spam that will be applied.

What about the issue that Knol pages might start dominating
Google’s search results, pushing out other content, in part because they
enjoy the strong authority of Google’s core domain? For example, it’s well discussed
in SEO circles that sites that are "trusted" through having earned
"authority" in various ways can seemingly can rank for anything.

Google assured me that the authority of Google’s domain wouldn’t give
Knol any additional trust. Knol pages will be scored based on the links and
PageRank pointing to individual pages.

And if spam isn’t kept in control, could Knol find itself banned on
Google? Yes, Dupont said.

Do We Need Knol?

While Knol only supports English and name verification for those in the
US at launch, Google hopes to quickly internationalize it. Support for
multiple languages, including Arabic and Spanish, should come quickly.
Indeed, Dupont said that Google views Knol as being more important for many
non-English speakers who’ve yet to publish material because of what Google
views to be a lack of good tools in their countries.

That leads me back to my dubiousness I had when Knol was first announced:

Google already offers other content creation tools, such as
Blogger and
Google Page Creator. In addition,
there are non-Google tools people already use to publish content, not to
mention collaborative tools such as those I named at the opening of this
article. Why yet another tool?

Manber said that Knol has a special focus on authors and a collection
of tools that Google thinks is unique, and which in turn should encourage
both content creation and readership….

Somehow, I suspect Seth Godin over at Squidoo isn’t going to be buying
the uniqueness argument. At least on the face of the screenshots (the one
above is a page authored by Manber’s wife, who is testing the system),
Squidoo offers pages featuring authors prominently, which also allow
ratings and some collaboration.

Google is sticking with the idea that Knol is indeed needed:

"Blogger wasn’t created to solve a search problem. I do believe [Knol]
does solve a search problem. The problem we have, unlocking what people know
and bringing it online. This is another tool to help release some of this
knowledge. My dad has never written anything online. If he sees value in
writing a knol, we’d be hugely successful," Dupont said.

And the competition with Wikipedia? Isn’t that what this is, a Wikipedia
challenger?

"We’re not trying to build an encyclopedia. That’s a very focused product.
Wikipedia has a great product, but that’s not what we’re doing. What we’re
building is a place for people to store their bits of knowledge, and each of these bits come
with the author bios and opinions and clearly that’s
very different from an encyclopedia. We hope many of these knols and their
authors will be referenced by Wikipedia and encyclopedias and help them,"
Dupont said.

In particular, he also noted that unlike Wikipedia, there’s no "one"
entry for any particular topic. Any topic might have many different knols
produced by different authors.

Watch & See

Overall, I still lean toward not wanting Google to do this. I remain
concerned that by hosting this content, it plays too much in the content
owner space when its core business is supposed to be driving traffic
outbound to others. Hosting content sets up inherent conflicts that over time
start to erode the trust people have in Google, I feel.

It’s difficult, of course. YouTube is hosting content, but if YouTube
hadn’t offered hosting to begin with, some of the good content there would
never have appeared. Google Book Search is another example. Skip the legal
issues over in-copyright books. Google’s hosting plenty of out-of-copyright
content that’s helpful — and if it didn’t host it, that content wouldn’t exist on the web at all.

I can see the value in Knol’s toolset and the potential it might offer to
help collect further knowledge. Similarly, the unique environment that Yahoo
Answers has created has indeed led to answers showing up on the web that
might otherwise not have appeared. So I’ll give Knol the benefit of the
doubt — that it will perhaps occupy a space not being filled, rather than
push others aside. I just wish it weren’t Google

For more, see related discussion on Techmeme.