Google Knol is a No Match for Wikipedia

It’s more than six months for Google’s Knol set foot in the webworld. Aimed at provide food for authors Knol was to offer more credible Knowledge units to web. Knol was anticipated to be a tough challange for Wikipedia. Things appear pretty well with 100,000 pieces of knowledge published and shockingly quick schedule of incremental releases. No way! Get in  the site is all filled with trash and nobody’s interested in reading it. Even after half a year, its on queer street. Where do the authors go?

Now, let the cat out of the bag. To begin with the article rankings, Knol’s article are rare on the Google search results. Whereas most of the Wikipedia items top the search list. For more even the articles like IPv6 with elaborate details fail to impress. It attracts just a handful of pageviews a week.

The numbers are low enough so much so that you can put the 50 pageviews a week into the elite club. Just imagine even the 7 Steps to Create Massive Traffic to Your Site generated not more than a spattering pageviews. For more you can search Barack Obama. An assortment of entries come up. Now majority of Knol users write their own entries rather than adding to others, so proliferation of entries are inevitable. You can still guess if the best ones are rising to the top.

Coming to the quality of content, Google’s idea of monetizing is clearly evident and probably leads to a perverse effect. There are a number of them, nearly copy paste jobs from the company brochure or HTML versions of the work. Look for the US Army Survival Manual.

Although, it gathers plenty of detailed commentary from learned professionals, the count is much lower than that of the spams, plagiarisms or a stub.

Well the good news is Google is aware of the inconsistency. They have offered to review tools to get hold of the questionable, illegal or merely bad content. But the point is how will Google make Knol a truly knowledgeable source so that people at least talk of it.