Google Publishes 100,000th Knol

[Jacek01]

Google's Knol website has recently received its 100,000th article, known as knol, and the search engine was pleased to announce on its official blog that things were starting to go its way. The rapid expansion of the new website, which is only 5 months old, is nothing but good news, and everybody at Google expressed their admiration for the thousands of users that wrote on the site, contributing to its increasing database. Bad mouths have it that Google is currently going after Wikipedia, attempting to reclaim the first returned result to query position that the free encyclopedia owns for most one- or two-word searches.

In a way, the two projects — Knol and Wikipedia — are quite similar: they both aim at becoming a comprehensive and throughout repository of freely accessible, verifiable knowledge in text and pictures format that can be used for research released via a license that allows for free redistribution and can be freely edited by other users.

The Knol interface is now available in eight languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish) and we are excited that our users are helping us translate it into many more languages using the Google in Your Language console.

Knols are basically articles, much like Wikipedia entries, which are written by experts in the field, and are meant as an online “unit of knowledge,” as the site description says. As opposed to its more famed rival, Knol allows users to advertise their websites directly inside the article. Users are also allowed to name the articles however they see fit, and they can utterly disregard ambiguity issues when choosing to name their pieces in confusing terms.

"Encouraging people to contribute their knowledge online is particularly important for languages with limited web content, and we are glad to see that knols have been written in 59 different languages to date. It has been very exciting to have people all over the world come forward to help improve online content in their language." on Google official blog.

The lack of a central authority or community that decides standards for the pages contained on the site also led to poor and non-uniform formatting, as opposed to Wikipedia's; the lack of a central control also brought to a proliferation of duplicate content, which tends to make information on the site both very repetitive and hard to find with a simple site search.

People visit Knol from 197 countries and territories on an average day, from the Aland Islands and Antarctica to Zambia and Zimbabwe.

[MACY]

with the Google product; however, there are still several issues that need to be fixed in order for Knol to start becoming a real threat to Wikipedia.