

Is Google Knol failing? - larryfreeman
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/poor-google-knol-has-gone-from-a-wikipedia-killer-to-a-craigslist-wannabe/

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TomOfTTB
Is it failing? I think it's a little late for that question. More like "why
did it fail?"

I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your net wide,
devote a small amount of resources to a bunch of products and hope some of
them take off. That's what Knol is part of and that's fine. Google's mistake
has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.

Given that I consider articles like this to be exactly the level of mockery
they deserve.

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tokenadult
_Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became
an embarrassment._

Yes. But there was probably too much corporate inertia to shut it down within
forty-eight hours after it was opened to public posting, by which time it was
a huge embarrassment.

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naz
Knol is Google trying to Cuil Wikipedia

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rimantas
Honestly, it took me this headline to recall that thing exist at all…

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sown
Well...here, courage is being scared of embarrassment but doing it anyways.
nice try, G.

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kqr2
_Why Google's online encyclopedia will never be as good as Wikipedia_

<http://www.slate.com/id/2200401>

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sachinag
God, I hope they shut it down. It was immediately populated by SEO freaks who
kept looking at PR flowing from a google.com domain. And it made me feel like
I had to do it, and I hate doing shit purely for SEO reasons.

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I_got_fifty
Oh, yeah Knol. Is that still around?

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jmonegro
Google what?

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onreact-com
Google just needs to downrank Wikipedia a little and it fails. I guess Google
Knol will sooner or later rank above Wikipedia. We all know that Eric Schmidt
has denied that "don't be evil" has been ever an official motto of his
corporation.

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whughes
Sorry, but Google Knol does not and probably will never match Wikipedia for
sheer scope and variety of content. You can't outrank Wikipedia if you aren't
even competing with it.

Knol has ~300,000 articles in total, many of which are instructional on
specific subtopics. Wikipedia has 3 million articles in English on every
topic. Not only is Wikipedia much bigger, it also has a more specific focus
(creating an encyclopedia).

~~~
onreact-com
Yeah, but you can outrank where you already have an article. ;-) Once Knol
ranks above Wikipedia more people will notice and contribute.

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sho
Just the name was bad enough to doom it, IMO.

