Google shoots for Wikipedia from Knol
14 Dec 2007 | 11:01 GMT
Plans in-house rival
WIKIPEDIA has always divided critics between "wisdom of crowds" idealists and "Wackypedia" naysayers but now Google would appear to want a chance to divide them too.
The G-men are planning a rival for the community encyclopedia and the result could well change the way hundreds of millions of us use the web.
Called Knol, a rum sort of abbreviation of the word “knowledge”, the service is aimed at tapping our collective knowledge to make information on the web more reliable.
Here’s the opening of the blogged announcement:
“The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.”
Hmm, sound familiar? Of course, this isn’t the first time someone has taken a pop at Wikipedia but the brute power of Google’s search dominance makes it very different to stuff like Mahalo. But if Google goes ahead and places Knol entries higher than Wikipedia entries, that’s the kind of advantage that Microsoft gets from placing IE on its desktop and could attract similar interest from regulators.
You can’t have a go at Knol just yet unless you’ve had a personal invite from Google Knol but, this being the G-men, we can anticipate that over time more of you will be invited to join in the fun, just as occurred with GMail. Slowly, slowly catchee Wiki, or something like that.
I like Wikipedia. It may not be more reliable than the bloke down the pub at times but it has entries for a phenomenally wide range of subjects. After that, you’re probably going to have to use a bit of common sense and find second sources to be confident, but it should get better over time as topics are refined and writers get better.
But then you could say something similar about The INQUIRER. µ
© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007