

3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia - joop
http://thenextweb.org/2008/07/25/3-reasons-why-knol-will-beat-wikipedia/

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azharcs
3 reasons why Wikipedia will kick Knol's Ass.

[0] => No ads and it is clean. It is made by people who don't intend to make
money, created by people whose world don't revolve around money and read by
people who value knowledge more than money.

[1] => Wikipedia is millions of pages ahead of Google Knol when it comes to
content. 7 million pages in 200 languages. Money can't buy you that.

[2] => Wikipedia is synonymous with knowledge but with Google Knol, only the
first four letters match, that is the closest it comes to knowledge.

I can go on, but will stop here. This is Google's narrow minded way of making
money by showing more ads. They clearly were directing lot of traffic to
Wikipedia pages, they realized why direct the traffic to some other site when
we can let users steal content from Wikipedia and show it in Knol.

~~~
vaksel
there is only one reason it'll beat knol...EVERYONE knows that wikipedia is
where you go for info on the web. Most people now don't search for "______",
they now search for "_____ wiki" to avoid the ad infested sites.

Knol is just another case of Google copy pasting other people's products, w/o
real care if it succeeds or not. If it does? GREAT! If it doesn't? Well at
least we managed to get 20,000,000 page views and got us $500,000 more in ad
revenue

~~~
maien
exactly. Now when people are confused about something, they will go to wiki
for validation, even they know it is not 100%. but people do trust it.

If google is able to change the habit to 'xxxx knol', i think google can do
anything on the web.

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jm4
What's up with this headline? The original article's headline is "3 reasons
why Knol will beat Wikipedia". Changing it to "3 reasons why Knol will beat
Wikipedia's ass" is just plain immature and makes HN look like Digg or Reddit.
We're talking about two competing companies, not a celebrity boxing match. It
certainly makes it less likely anyone is going to take the article, your
submissions and comments seriously.

If people here want to keep this place from turning into a cess pool like just
about every other social news site it's up to us to keep crap like this off
the front page.

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Erwin
I checked the article's claim for myself -- "Results 1 - 10 of about
12,700,000 for read russian."

"How to read Russian in 75 minutes" knol at #5 -- but it was created
yesterday.

Google does not seem so objective now.

~~~
babul
It is greed that will become the downfall of Google as they comprise many
aspects of their service to generate revenue.

Honesty, integrity, reliability, trust, et al, are values they should not
compromise to push their products. We know "don't be evil" is dead, but
perhaps be less evil than you are being now.

~~~
omouse
It is the poisoning of culture that will be their downfall. Do you really
think if Google was run by engineers they'd release something like this upon
the world? Heck no. There's no technical challenge in Knol.

Google! If you ever see this, bring back the old Google...the Google that
created GMail and a damn good search engine.

------
tx
There is another knol out there, it's called "about.com", and all 3 points the
author is making (including high pagerank) isn't working for them.

Most of content on about.com is utter junk: a bunch of bored housewives trying
to make a buck are desperate to write something, anything.

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hugh
I just looked at knol. It seems to be set up in such a way that it will
encourage the creation of junk adword-magnet articles ("how to buy a hi-fi
system", "how to find a personal injury lawyer in the state of Michigan")
rather than the creation of truly high-quality articles by experts.

Hell, I'm an expert in a few things, and I currently feel far more motivated
to write a junky "how to buy X" article than I do to write about anything I
actually know.

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redorb
Google can't be subjective, its on a freaking google subdomain. Search engines
do treat subdomains as seperate new pages (with little ranking effect from the
domain) it still on google.com which makes it golden, then Im sure
mattcutts.com/blog and other googlers blog roll is pointed to it - its done, a
page on knol will soon rank higher than a page with exact same content on
wikipedia.

~~~
oostevo
Per folks in the know, Google doesn't give itself any preferential treatment.

Try searching for 'search' with Google. Google itself (perhaps the best known
search engine) comes in at result #20 -- at the bottom of the second page of
search results.

~~~
alex_c
But they don't really have any reason to care what position Google shows up
for "search" for someone already using Google to search.

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eisokant
I agree completely with you Joop. The killer feature here is that users can
get a substantial pay from their articles if Google keeps on ranking them
high. However this could also be its downfall.

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shabda
Seriously! This gets to HN top stories?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256481> is way better reserched.

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jmatt
Well lets go over a handful of things Knol is missing.

No search results for: engineering, math, computer, internet or transistor.
One of Wikipedia's strong points is it's ability to provide not historic
information but technical information. Whether it's an mathematical concept,
an algorithm or a definition it'll either tell you what you need to know or at
least send you in the right direction. Until Knol finds a way to address some
of these shortcomings in basic subjects, it will not be on my list of
searches.

I can see both sides when in comes to licensing. I think Google's goal is to
make experts in the business world participate. It'll be interesting to see
what actually ends up happening.

Allowing ads and adsense to encourage posting seems to be equivalent to buying
the information. For things that are subjective this is great because you know
your moderator and thus the source of the information. But for most subjects,
users don't want them moderated one direction or another. Users want to know
facts or as unbiased an opinion as possible. Leave it to bloggers to create
all those opinion pieces that everyone loves or hates so much.

------
rsheridan6
>This approach takes people out of anonymity and potential incorrect
contributions

Well, I'm sold. I'd hate to have something politically incorrect corrupting my
precious bodily fluids.

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poppysan
What you guys fail to see is that sure the product alreadfy exists. for
scholars and techies wikipedia is great. But the text-driven presentation
doesnt draw the regular joe who looks at presentation over function.

Look at apple. Sure their devices work, but I've heard several people say they
bought it because its pretty. also mp3 players were out before ipod. they
worked, in a lot of ways, better than ipod. But the apple machine could sell
evian to a drowning man, as can the google machine.

------
ckinnan
Google is selling ads on pages they host that are reached by their search
engine. Conflict of interest?

~~~
greyman
No.

AFAIK, Google said they want to organize world's information. They didn't say
that those informations cannot be hosted in google.com domain.

Moreover, nobody is forced to use Google, or buy their ads, or click on Knol
links in SERPs.

------
anewaccountname
Wikipedia beat everything2, therefor Knol won't beat Wikipedia. Knol is just a
pretty everything2.

------
koshurinov
Objectively, all listed Knol features can be turned vice versa. But no wonder
that money with name of Google can make perfect results together...

------
volida
i will give you 1 reason why it won't beat Wikipedia

The name sucks. It reminds me of some kind of a lost god

------
greyman
I welcome Knol, in my opinion this move from Google is well within their
mission of organizing world's information - they are creating platform for
experts organizing their knowledge on google-hosted servers. Isn't About.com
and others doing the same?

I wouldn't be surprised if they will place Knols even above other search
results in SERPS - it's their right to do so and I don't have problems with
that.

I think Wikipedia is not threatened by this, since it's rather different
service. While Wikipedia is very useful, it also has its flaws, for example it
is not really open - entity is not allowed (or even persecuted publicly) for
editing entry about itself. I hope Knol will not have such a restriction.

I have been using Wikipedia as my starting point when researching subject I
know very little about. In the future I might use two starting points -
Wikipedia and Knol. From user perspective, that's only good.

