Google's Knol Poses a Threat to Mahalo

About six months after first announcing a private beta test of its Knol project, Google (GOOG) has thrown the doors open, and is inviting anyone who wants to create an entry to jump on board. Unlike Wikipedia — to which it is most often compared — Google’s Knol allows authors to effectively take ownership of articles they write about topics in which they are (or believe themselves to be) experts. And instead of there just being one article on a subject, to which multiple authors contribute, Google says that it expects there to be multiple entries about a given topic, written by different people. Contributors can also offer their own edits to a particular article, which the author can choose to accept or not.

Obviously, a user-generated compendium of knowledge about a variety of topics sounds a lot like a little thing called Wikipedia, and there’s no question that Knol is going to compete with the crowd-sourced encyclopedia to some extent (Wikipedia has also been considering the addition of an “approval system,” which would make it even more like Knol). But I think Knol poses an even bigger threat to Mahalo, the people-powered search service created by Jason Calacanis — and to a lesser extent other directory-style tools like Seth Godin’s Squidoo and About.com (owned by the New York Times (NYT)), not to mention Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s Citizendium project.

Mahalo has a bit of a head start, but the model is surprisingly similar: get authors to create and “curate” articles about topics, with links and so on. Mahalo has also proven to be fairly successful at getting its results to show up high in Google searches — to the point where Allen Stern has called it “an SEO play.” But will it continue to rank as highly when entries on the same topic from Google’s own knowledge directory are available too? I doubt it. To add insult to injury, Knol will also allow authors to put AdSense on their pages and share in the revenue, which could make becoming an author fairly attractive — at least as attractive as Jason has made Mahalo, or Seth has made Squidoo.

As I said when I wrote about Knol back in December, I think it could become a pretty powerful tool, and the addition of Google AdSense is also potentially a game-changer. Any thoughts, Jason?

Comments

[Mark Moran]

Knol is an admission that technology-driven search engine results very often do not provide users with answers to their questions. The Web let you quickly access multiple sources of information about almost anything. But most users don't know how to sift millions of results to find the best sources - many do not review more than the first five results, and to Google's chagrin and envy, Wikipedia is usually among those five. This is what has given rise to the next generation of human-powered search alternatives, including my own, findingDulcinea, each of which in its own way distills the Internet through a filter of human judgment, and provides the "endorsed" results that users want, and think they are getting now from search engines. Knol will certainly have some success, but like Mahalo and Wikipedia, it will lack the consistent editorial policy, approach, voice and quality that we bring to helping users find comprehensive and credible resources to Web users. As with Wikipedia and Mahalo, some entries will be very good, and some may be dangerously bad. You get to try to figure out which ones are which.

[Atli3ns]

The problem with anyone being an author to articles is the legitimacy to there information. Most bloggers talk through opinion and usually try to convince others. "Wikipedia has also been considering the addition of an “approval system”" but if you think about it the fact the people will have the ability to put the advertising on their information gives people alternative reasons to boost their ratings, thus more hits = more advertisement which makes the author and the advertisement happy. People will be making more and more email accounts with multiple screen names so they can approve their own writing to increase their hits. If google does the ranking system with advertisement people will start doing stupid things to boost ratings. It is simply to hard to have multiple authors on many issues when they can also have alternative motives to give fake information to their website or to even boast about their own company. It is simply going to be one massive blog with many many people trying to demand ideas/opinions on the site, so many people will spend hours looking for the "right" author/article. Hopefully there will be a staff or something to go over some of the massive about of material

[vagredajr]

Mark, findingdulcinea looks very nice, although that URL isn't exactly going to stick in the mind (or keys).

I'm not sure what you mean when comparing Mahalo and Wikipedia and you say "some may be very bad." That's true of any product, editorial team or not. In this game the credibility is a game of percentages. I would say Wikipedia has less than Mahalo because Mahalo has a core team of editors vetting things. They even work within earshot of each other, so I'm sure there's plenty of back-and-forth in realtime.

But Wikipedia? Ask your local librarian. Or ask my wife. She went there the other day to look up an article and saw "JASON LOVES PAC-MAN" on the page. I assume that wasn't Calacanis, but you see my point. Visit the Mahalo page for Pac-Man to see the difference. On Mahalo, the options to find other sources of information (or just play the game) are right there in front of you.

Mat, I'd say Knol does indeed ramp this game up. Considering there are only so many slots on a page for results, eventually this will become a crazy SEO battle. As if it hadn't already!

[REG CROWDER]

I'm not sure where The Land of Knol is headed but I decided to try it out for myself. This is the URL:

knol.google.com/k/reg-...

REG CROWDER
International Investing (A Google Knol)