Search and advertising giant Google is developing a user-generated online encyclopedia that could rival Wikipedia.
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.
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. 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. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
Google has named the encyclopedia the "knol project," a knol being a "unit of knowledge," according to a blog post by Google engineering vice president Udi Manber. The company aims to tie strong identities to contributing authors and those seeking to edit knols.
"Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," wrote Manber. "The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts to medical information, from geographical and historical to entertainment, from product information to how-to-fix-it instructions."
Google will host and provide tools to produce and edit knol Web pages, but will not edit or advocate any of the content. However, entries that Google judges to be of higher quality will be given a higher page ranking inGoogle search.
Entries will be rated by the community and will be able to be reviewed after the unspecified testing period. The project is in beta and has been sent to a small group of testers. Once the knol tool goes live, contributors will be able to monetize their pages by including Google ads.
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