Google launches the beta of ‘Knol’ as rival of Wikipedia

Dec 19:  The Internet colossal Google has launched the beta version of ‘Knol’ for the testing purpose only for some selective invitee. ‘Knol’ is Google’s new free open source encyclopedia that will work to provide massive and diverse knowledge to the users. It is assuming that Knol might be proved as a strong contestant of another top web encyclopedia, ‘Wikipedia’.

Google, on its official web-blog has released the information regarding its latest tool ‘Knol’ that denotes ‘a unit of knowledge’ for the testing purpose. Some expert invitees are conducting the test worldwide. This encyclopedia will cover almost all the topics including science and technology, health and medicine, history and historical places, the complete profile of any eminent personality, geography, entertainment, complete product information and the instruction about how-to-fix-it.

In the Google’s official blog http://Googleblog.blogspot.com/ Udi Manber, the Vice President of Engineering for Google has written, “Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing.”

Describing the purpose of this new online encyclopedia, Manber wrote in the blog, “The key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, and scientific articles always have authors”.

Here, Knol goes different from ‘Wikipedia’. There is no name displayed in the website of the contributors except number of contributors. Here the authors can neither publish his/her byline but can also post it with their photograph. In Knol, the author cannot edit other’s work like in Wikipedia, while they can create their own ‘Knol’ and upload it on ‘Knol’.

“We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.” Google said.

Google will invite people to author their own "Knols" by providing the tools of producing and editing theirs’ Knol. “Neither it will be edited nor advocated any of content”, claimed Google. "All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that Knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line.", said Udi.

The ranking of the pages will be decided by the users not by the editors. Google will rank the submissions, or knols, as per Google search results and also will make the content available to other search engines. "We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge," said Manber.

Besides these, Google will also share the portion of profit earned via the advertisements as Google has included the ad-revenue facility like its others Ad-sense tool. Though, Google has not disclosed the pay scale shared with the authors.

Google hopes that through ‘Knol’ Google can reach to more mass, as more and more people will come to sorting out any information. Google is on the top in search engine while ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Live’ search owned by Microsoft Inc. are its strong rivals.

In this response, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia is still following the ‘wait-an-watch’ formula. "Google does a lot of cool stuff, but a lot of that cool stuff doesn't work out so great," said Wales.

Responding on Google’s revenue-sharing formula, Wales assumed that there might end up being a focus on less academic submissions because there can be lots of awful article on Knol like ‘hundreds of articles about Viagra’ can affects the number of users.