Knol cannot challenge the trusted and well established wikipedia at the moment. Time will tell whether its content will gain the top position and overtake the wikipedia as google did with the search engine business
Been tracking the Google Knol articles on the new Google Knol Tracker , and from what I've seen - it's a lot of Health articles and a lot more Ezine Articles like than wikipedia like. So, for right now there is no real competition to wpedia.
reliable ? Hardly.... for reliable info you still have to dig in the library. Wiki, knol....I would not rely on that for objective, researched info... Wikipedia is good for trivial info .... nothing else... probably knol will be the same....
Why is there so much focus on competition against Wikipedia? I think Knol is competing more directly against Article Directories. I would be more concerned if I am EzineArticles or GoArticles.
Google has a PR of 10 while Wikipedia has a PR of 8. And you guys are saying that Knol can't compete... The sheer fact that Knols have a .google extension will rank them higher in search engines. Google was very clever not to make Knol its own domain. If you're selling a product and your best friend has a product, who's are you going to push harder? Knol doesn't have to look and behave like Wikipedia to compete with it. It looks more like Google designed Knols with Wikipedia, HubPages, and Squidoo in mind. Individuals author pages similar to HubPages and Squidoo, but they can choose to allow collaboration similar to the way Wikipedia does. Wikipedia is not a widely-trusted source because anyone can edit the articles. I've seen several Wikis that have spam and porn in the pages. Google was a little smarter about maintaining credibility. They require users to be verifiable people with verfiable contact information. And, they allow users to choose whether others can contribute to their information. So far, I've seen closed, open, and moderated collaboration options which tells me that it's not possible any old Joe Blow to sign in and spam the site.
I have always remained loyal to Wikipedia and remain loyal to it. That is, unless knol can convince me otherwise....
Looks that there is need to improve more.. But not a bad start from google. I think google will make a good and better..
As I see Knol has some advantages: 1. They allow HTML. As for me I hate Wikipedia's WYSIWYG 2. Phone Verification is a good idea to control the quality of the content. Google promises to verify your identity using your phone. This will add to the legitimacy I think. 3. Interesting feature is the ability of inviting others to help you with your articles. The content will grow faster because of this.
The fact that Google dominates the web and practically dictates the majority of where traffic ends up means that Knol will also dominate. I have no doubt that any article on Knol will rank higher than any similar article on Wikipedia, regardless of it's content, links and age.
Well there will be a tough tie between both. Becuase google has its best search engine they can drive enough traffic to knol. But Wikipedia is a very big site and old too. Have enough reputation in all over the world. Lets see what happens?
I think Knol will *magically* outrank Wikipedia in several highly competitive topics in Google. If you own a search engine, than it's almost natural that you push your own content to the top 5 search results, that's what will happen with the Knol pages.
Although I'm a Google fan, it's never healthy to have a monopoly as Google almost has, as regarding search engines.