Google has added audio playback to some of its Google Knol articles; this page on Echocardiography is an example. Clicking on the “Listen” link in the upper right displays an audio player with surprisingly clear sound. Google Operating System recently pointed to more information on an Audio Knol help page:

We are experimenting with Audio Playback as an option for some knols, starting with a handful of English language featured knols. You can listen using our Flash player, or by downloading an mp3 file and using any mp3 player.

The page says additional languages may be added if the experiment is successful.

YouTube, Too

Google has also added an Audio Preview button to YouTube that lets people hear audio of their own comments before posting it.

Matt Cutts confirmed suspicions that this “feature” was a playful response to a recent xkcd cartoon.

But it begs the question: Where else can Google add audio across its properties? Is there a chance we’ll someday see audio playback

• of search results?
• of AdWords ads? (”click to hear this ad”?)
• in Gmail?
• of reviews on Google Maps?
• of web pages viewed in Google Chrome?
• in Google Reader?
• in Google Docs?

If these audio experiments on sites like Knol are successful, wouldn’t Google try the same on other products?

I was surprised to see a post covering Knol’s how to ackpack was already hitting the number three spot on Google. Really? I mean, how many links could this page have gotten already? As it turns out, quite a few. And more important, it’s featured on the Knol home page, which itself is probably one of the most important links. While Knol uses nofollow on individual knols to prevent link credit from flowing out, it’s not used on the home page — so home page credit can flow to individual knols featured on it.

Right now, the Knol home page shows no PageRank score at all. It’s a brand new site, after all. But just because there’s no visible PageRank, behind the scenes, Google is constantly calculating PageRank values (see What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters for more on this). So being on the Knol home page is almost certainly giving some of these pages important link credit.

To test things more, I picked out 30 different knols listed on the Knol home page, to see if they ranked in the top 30 results for the words they’re titled for. Here are the results, with pages listed in order of how well they ranked:

1. Facial cosmetic enhancementt: 1
2. How to backpack: 3 (backpacking: 19; backpack: 0)
3. Toilet clogs: 3
4. Vomiting in infants and children: 3 (”vomiting in infants” ranks 13)
5. Decreased hearing: 5
6. Type 1 diabetes: 6
7. First Ironman triathlon: 6
8. Orchid basics: 7
9. Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs): 10 (lose the [ICDs] part, it drops to 17)
10. Pneumothorax or "collapsed lung": 10
11. Pediatric sports injuries: 13
12. Tooth pain: 15
13. Adrenal insufficiency: 0
14. AIDS: 0
15. Autism: 0
16. Barrett’s Esophagus: 0
17. Cataracts: 0
18. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD): 0
19. Crohn’s Disease: 0
20. Devil May Cry 4: 0
21. Echocardiography: 0
22. High cholesterol: 0
23. History of the Spanish language: 0
24. Infective endocarditis: 0
25. Lung cancer: 0
26. Menopause -what is it?: 0
27. Patient safety: 0
28. Seasonal allergies: 0
29. Shoulder urgery: 0
30. Teething: 0

OK, so 10 of the 30 — 33% of what I looked at — hit the top ten or first page of results. You can spin that both ways. It’s proof that being in Knol is NOT an automatic ride to the top of the search results. But then again, knowing that 33% of your stuff will rank within a day is a pretty good track record.

There are lots and lots of caveats to consider. For one, doing a backlink lookup in Google is pretty useless, since Google deliberately underreports the links it knows about. For example, that "how o backpack" page comes back with no reported backlinks. Yet if I do this query – how to backpack knol — I come across at least two pages that link to the backpacking page. And over on Google Blogsearch, you can get better reporting to see 78 backlinks to it.

So backlinks directly to some of the top ranking pages might be helping more than can be easily seen (and Google, this is one reason why you ought to report backlinks fully for any site, to help us when we want to debunk stuff). But then again, here’s a test knol I made yesterday – Firefox plugins for SEO & SEM — which ranks 28 for firefox plugins for seo. I never linked to it from my article about knol. I don’t think it made the Knol home page. I can see only three links pointing at it, and only one of those links uses anchor text relevant to what the page is ranking for. And it’s in the top 30 results?

Look, I know that being ranked 28 is pretty much near invisible in terms of traffic you’ll get from search engines. But then again, to go from nowhere to the 28th top page in Google out of 755,000 matches? I’m sorry – don’t tell me that being in Knol doesn’t give your page some authority. Yes, I understand that individual backlinks will likely make the difference in how high you rank for a particular term. But the bottom line is that Knol feels like a trusted domain to Google, and content hosted on trusted domains will do better, in my opinion.

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.

Ah, sweet irony. Yesterday I spent some time raising concerns about knowledge aggregation sites like Wikipedia and the forthcoming Google Knol potentially ranking tops for every search conducted. Today, what’s in the top results for Knol? Yep — a new Wikipedia page on the topic!

The page was created yesterday and took less than 24 hours to show up. Looking at the top results for Knol is also fascinating in how until last week, the Google project wasn’t announced, so the results had no reflection of it. Today, they dominate the page:

Let’s run down the list.

1. KNOL is also the ticker symbol for Knology, and the Yahoo Finance page about that company has managed to hang on to the top spot.
    
2. The official Google Blog post on Knol comes next.
    
3. The official Google screenshot of an example Knol page shows up third. Some SEO advice to Google: Get a title tag on that page so it doesn’t look all weird when listed. You might also want to put a link at the top of the page over to your blog post so people hitting the screenshot have somewhere to go for more information.
    
4. Search authority Tim Bray warms my heart by covering how "transparent" Wikipedia actually is pretty closed given "a forest of acronym" and other issues that make me nod my head in violent agreement. But he doesn’t see Knol as a solution.
    
5. MarketWatch’s page about Knology comes next.
    
6. Mashable’s write-up on Knol is fifth. Sniff. We were one of the few places pre-briefed by Google on Knol and had an article with details not in the official blog post, which is what the Mashable article and virtually all other news stories were based on. But we get relegated to position 20 in the search results. Sniff. But congrats to Mashable, and we’ll look forward to when Search Engine Land is a bit older. With age comes authority and an easier way to make it to the top. We only just turned one!
    
7. Wikipedia makes it at sixth. It’ll be interesting to see if the page rises over time. FYI, Squidoo has three pages about Knol now. I like this one that’s just a copy of the official Google Blog post. I guess the author missed the Google copyright statement at the bottom of the post. The other two (here and here) are pretty basic. Mahalo’s got a nice page of mainly news commentary (though our write-up, sniff, isn’t listed). As for Yahoo Answers, three questions: how can someone get a Knol invite (here, and you can’t); are there reasons for Yahoo Answers folks to be afraid of Knol (here), and how does Knol compare to Wikipedia (here).
    
8. Noah Brier’s two paragraph summary of Knol pulls off a nice coup by getting into the top ten.
    
9. News.com’s write-up on Knol.
    
10. Wired’s write-up on Knol.

Also, I took a quick spin at Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask. Main differences?

• Yahoo results are pretty similar to Google, though the Dutch Knol-Online makes it in the top results.
   
• Microsoft gets Knol Computers, Knol Farms, and Wikipedia’s Knol Tate page into the top results. Let’s hear it for diversity in search listings! You also get finance pages about Knology. As for Google Knol, you get one single page of ZDNet coverage — not even the official Google Blog post. Come on, Microsoft – that post should be there.
   
• Ask has even more diversity, from Ryan Knol Designs to this page that mentions someone named Knol, among many other people. Google Knol is covered by only a single News.com article about the service. The official blog post doesn’t show, and that’s just as disappointing as with Microsoft.

Squidoo

Knol seems most like Seth Godin’s Squidoo site. In Seth’s response to the Knol announcement, he illustrates well how closely related the two seem to be by taking the example Knol page on insomnia that Google put out and reproducing it on Squidoo.

The Google page was Creative Commons licensed to allow reproduction, so there’s no harm, no foul in doing this. Of course, Knol authors will not be required to license out their content for reuse, to my understanding, so Squidoo won’t be able to pull this trick all the time.

Creating that page really highlights how bizarre the Google Knol move is, at least on the face of what Google says versus how it acts.

Google has been pretty vocal in the past that it doesn’t want to put out copy-cat products. Google products are supposed to go beyond the state-of-the-art and offer something unique that isn’t in the marketplace. And when Knol was announced, it was explained to me that it would be providing a unique tool. Yet, clearly Knol isn’t so unique that it can’t be reproduced on Squidoo.

Seth tries to put a positive spin on new competitor Google coming into his space:

Then, a funny thing happened: I started getting notes of congratulations. Of all the business models and all the internet ideas to jump on, Google had chosen ours. There were hundreds of neat ideas out there, but they picked ours.

That goes a long way to legitimize the original idea. It brings new users into the space. It makes it easier to find partners who want to exploit this ‘new’ idea. It allows room for creativity. It’s not about whether or not someone should be doing this. It’s about which place they want to do it in. That’s a huge change.

Just as the acquisition of blogger led to an explosion in blogging software, Google’s Knol makes the space pioneered by Squidoo a lot more attractive.  Apparently, the best thing that can happen to you if you pick Google as a platform is that they mimic you.

Well, I don’t know that I’d be so positive. The folks at Technorati seem to have been struggling lately. Yet two years ago, we got to read similar positive sounding statements from then CEO David Sifry on how Google Blog Search has validated his model and made it easier for partners to know what Technorati was doing:

And a lot of the credit, he says, goes to Google. "I no longer have to explain what a blog is," he says. "It’s absolutely an easier business discussion now."

As I covered earlier, Squidoo already suffered a major blow when Google slapped it out of some rankings. And while Google is likely to suffer similar spam problems, a Google knowledge base has a huge advantage over Squidoo in being tied to the Google brand.

Mahalo

While it started as a supposed search engine, you only need to look at pages like this one about Google Analytics to understand that Mahalo is developing into a destination content site, rather than a search engine that points outbound. That page is an aggregation of knowledge about Google Analytics, which Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis would like to see ranking number one on Google for those words in the same way this page at Mahalo ranks for cheap hotel room.

That puts him in direct conflict with Squidoo, which would also like to rank tops for topics far and wide. Plus, Wikipedia is already the leader in actually doing this. I asked him if Google Knol getting into the space made him feel vindicated or scared. In between dealing with a missing passport, Jason twittered back:

Knol seems more like Wikipedia than Mahalo. Long articles etc. So, we might link to it over/with Wikipedia.

Also, maybe we post our "guides" to Knol and get 2x the earnings? Will you post your blog posts to it? Google our publisher?!

As I’ve already explained, I think Mahalo indeed has long articles and is heading down a path that makes it more akin to Wikipedia than a regular search engine, so I do think Knol is a threat. But Jason does raise an interesting point — potentially, he could publish on Knol, as well. The downside, of course, is that duplicate content issues could cause Mahalo to lose traffic from search engines, if Knol is seen as the more "primary" source. In addition, anyone publishing on Knol is going to be in a take-it-or-leave it position over how much ad revenue Google wants to share. Many would want more control than this.

Wikipedia

John Battelle pinged Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, who gave an answer similar to Seth and Jason:

Sounds more like Yahoo Answers than Wikipedia to me. It is not a collaborative tool, it is a competitive tool.

"We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing."

Very different from a wiki, and not likely to generate much of quality.

To be clear, Google has very much said to me that Knol is a collaborative tool. While there is one featured author, others can participate with that author’s permission. In terms of quality, I have to laugh along with some of those commenting on John’s blog that just because a sole author might be involved, Wikipedia would have better quality by involving many people. Commented Andrew Taylor:

The man whose website is an encyclopedia that can be edited by any idiot or liar says that knol is "not likely to generate much of quality"? I mean, fair play to Wikipedia it is mostly very good, but it strikes me as more than a little arrogant to dismiss knol, as if his particular system for user-generated content is the only one that might work.

As Michael Arrington points out today at TechCrunch, an interesting twist will be if Wikipedia content — which can also be repurposed with appropriate credit — starts showing up on Knol. That could help Wikipedia’s mission of disseminating information, though it doesn’t help Wikipedia itself earn money. But then again, it might also see Google taking action against its own pages in the same way it seemed to attack Answers.com earlier this year.

Aggregators: Can There Be Only One?

In my initial article on Knol, I expressed concern that so many knowledge aggregation sites trying to enjoy Wikipedia-like success potentially could push out from the top search results the independent, original content sources that they depend on.

Do we really need a dozen or more Wikipedia clones? Do we really want this as our search results:

Many I know have a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia. We love it because it really is often useful. We hate it because it seems to show up in every search result (Nick Carr today offers a fresh look at this today). I constantly get laughs when I remark that Wikipedia is required by law to be in the top listings for any search on Google. But I think we also tolerate this because of its non-profit nature.

In contrast, I see little reason to love the fact that Seth Godin has decided to make money by creating a web site that aims to rank well for everything. Ditto Jason Calacanis and Mahalo. That’s especially so when both of them have been dismissive of SEO or anti-SEO in the past (for Seth, see here in 2004 and here in 2005. For Jason, see here). To quote Seth from 2004:

SEOs are not a shortcut to success, at least not for 99% of the companies out there. You won’t win by fooling Google into listing you first for a common search term. You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.

Sorry, Seth — but from where I sit, Squidoo seems far less about turning strangers into friends and far more about trying to get a lot of traffic from search engines. And Jason, for all you’ve slammed against the SEO industry, you’ve created the ultimate SEO monster.

Now add into it this mix the fact that Google itself wants some SEO love? Seriously — do we really need Google to be competing against other sites in its own search listings? If Knol is going to launch, dare I suggest this? Make a special unit at the top of the page for a single Wikipedia link and then use some type of sitelinks style display to point to other aggregator sites such as Knol, Mahalo, Squidoo, or whatever. Somehow, someway, consolidate these types of sites and protect the variety and originality of core search results.

Postscript: Knol – Numbers to Lend Context to Google’s Announcement from Hitwise has some nice comparative stats on the popularity of the various knowledge sites.

Screenshot of Google Knol page (feel free to use this and those below, just link to this story, please)

Google Knol is designed to allow anyone to create a page on any topic, which others can comment on, rate, and contribute to if the primary author allows. The service is in a private test beta. You can’t apply to be part of it, nor can the pubic see the pages that have been made. Google also stressed to me that what’s shown in the screenshots it provided might change and that the service might not launch at all.

NOTE: Knol has launched since this article was written. See Google’s Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation

As said, the service gets its name from the word "knowledge." A "knol" is a new term that Google has coined to stand for a unit of knowledge, and they’re also using that word as the name for pages within the service and the service itself.

Knol pages will be hosted by Google. Authors will have the option to enable Google ads and share in revenue. The pages will be made available to be found through a Knol-specific search as well as through Google itself or via other search engines, as they won’t be blocked from spiders. It’s likely the service will be found at knol.google.com or some similar standalone address, if it indeed finally launches. As said, a launch might not happen at all — there’s certainly no set date.

Why do Knol? Google vice president of engineering, Udi Manber, who heads the project, told me that is designed to help people put knowledge on the web that doesn’t currently exist, which in turn should make search better, since there will be better information out there.

Of course, 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.

"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."

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.

Speaking of Squidoo leads to another issue. Back in July, Squidoo found spammers has caused the site itself to take a hit in Google rankings. For Google to offer a similar service seems an invitation to disaster. Won’t spammers overrun it, in the same way that many feel spammers have overrun Google-owned Blogger? Doesn’t that introduce yet more crud to ironically pollute Google’s own search results?

Manber said he expect spammers will end up in the system but that Google has already found ways to defeat them with Blogger and will take similar actions, if needed, with Knol. I’d agree, Blogger spam showing up in Google has gotten much better over the past few months. However, I don’t think I’d say the problem is defeated — and even if Google manages to wipe it out, it’s still potentially out there messing up other search engines.

This is not to say that all of Knol will be spam. Indeed, it’s likely that the prominence of having content within a Google-hosted service may attract some outstanding authors. Manber certainly expect this, saying that he hopes content is created that will be so good that Google itself will rank it tops in searches.

That leads to another problem. Is this Google going a step too far? Google abandoned its search roots long ago, the idea that it was just a pointer to other information. Today, its Search, Ads, & Apps mantra that CEO Eric Schmidt has repeated on several occasions underscores that offering content tools is fair game within its mission. But does hosting content turn it into a competitor with other content providers and set up an unfair advantage in gaining traffic that might otherwise flow to them?

Manber offered a number of reassurances that this is not the case:

• The content will be owned by the authors, who can reprint it as they like
   
• Authors can link out at will (and links might NOT have nofollow attributes on them, allowing reputation to flow from Knol pages to others)
   
• APIs will allow Knol information to be used by others
   
• Allowing ads other than Google’s might be a possibility (though this was something I raised, rather than Google suggesting itself. Personally, I highly doubt this would ever happen)
   
• Google will give no special weight to these pages; if they rank, they rank because they compete with other pages and win the algorithm race

Of course, Manber did say that Google could better tell which of the Knol pages were of high quality by looking at signals such as ratings. Because the content database is hosted at Google, it could easily pull the rating info in without having to "guess" or "scrape" it off pages.

My concern in hearing this was that other pages with ratings might not have their information taking in as a quality signal, since Google couldn’t as easily harvest it. Thus, Knol pages might get an unfair advantage. To that, Manber stressed that he didn’t see such signals being used at first, and if they were down the line, Google might seek a way for others to provide similar signals to its search engine.

Still, I have concerns about Knol in hurting independent authorship, just as some of the other services I’ve named do as well. Go back two years ago, and searches rarely came up with Wikipedia pages. Today, it almost feels required that Wikipedia gets one if not two listings on Google, due to its indented results feature.

The traffic that Wikipedia gets from Google has inspired others. Yahoo Answers pages show up in Google for topics; Mahalo would love to rank for top terms — and I’ve already mentioned Squidoo’s presence in search results. Now Google gets into the picture to have its own hosted content compete for the dwindling diversity of results on the search results page. It begins to feel like the knowledge aggregators are going to push out anyone publishing knowledge outside such aggregation systems.

I’ll have much more to say about this as I continue on from my Search 3.0 story and into the next chapter, Search 4.0, that’s touched on in the earlier piece. In short, at some point search engines cross over a line where they’re providing more information than simple answers or pointing out, which changes them from being a search service. Mahalo’s had a fast evolution along these lines, with some pages that are simply content destinations than search results. What happens when and if the major search engines do the same? Getting that balance of human knowledge, compiled information, but still being a pointer is important. If Knol launches, Google’s going to face that challenge square on.

Of course, in some ways Google might not have a choice. Yahoo has Yahoo Answers; Microsoft has its own answers service; Wikipedia has experienced huge growth, and things like Mahalo get some attention since they use humans, which Google is seen to ignore. A service like Knol might be necessary to stay competitive.

Here’s more of the screenshot from above:

Here’s how the bottom of the Knol page looks: