July 24, 2008:

Google Inc. announces the surfacing of an online-publishing service potentially threatening to Wikipedia’s existence.

On Wednesday, it took out the covers from ‘Knol’- a publishing-and-reference service like Wikipedia that allows users to write articles on specific topics and generate money from the advertisements attached with them.

Cedric Dupont, a product manager for ‘Knol’, however described the service as a way to improve Google’s search results by making the “information in people’s heads” searchable. “While Knol entries won’t meet any preferential treatment in Google’s search algorithm, the entries that are highly ranked by users could, however, surface higher in search results,” Dupont says.

However, Google’s ‘Knol’ differs from the Wikipedia – the user-generated online encyclopedia, in a number of ways. First and foremost, unlike Wikipedia, which allows only one article on a topic, ‘Knol’ will allow many articles to be posted on the same topic. Thus, making it much like a collection of individual blogs filling out the role of an encyclopedia.

In addition, users can attach their names to ‘Knol’ entries and others can comment on their work. While Wikipedia allows some users to edit others’ entries, ‘Knol’ won’t allow any redaction from third party users. Upon selection, Google would run ads on individual write-ups and one can share revenue from them. Alongside texts, every post would accommodate photos in different formats.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes that only time can tell whether ‘Knol’ will be able generate the sort of content that would make it a Wikipedia competitor. Wales avers, “It is far more like a collaborative blogging platform” that will generate “a lot of opinion pieces rather than encyclopedic content.”