Mark Moran

Google's Knol Poses a Threat to Mahalo

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.