Google News, Inside.

Google announced last week that it is creating a competitor to Wikipedia. Here is a small excerpt from the VP of engineering,

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

So essentially, Google is looking to create a user-contributed competitor to Wikipedia which they can monetize. Some people view Wikipedia as a great resource, but I however, do not care for Wikipedia. Personal opinions aside, Google has a huge motive for creating a competitor.

More money.

If Wikipedia opened up its doors and allowed Google to advertise all over Wikipedia, Google would not even think twice about shutting down the knol project. Why? Because they could serve their entire inventory on the already-existing Wikipedia pages. But, as we have heard from the Wikipedia founders, they will not be looking to monetize the site any time soon.

Google is looking at knol as a potential threat to steal traffic away from Wikipedia. Google could and probably will just as easily move traffic from Wikipedia over to knol. A few human touches to the algorithm and the knol is in business for traffic. Set it as a PR8, PR9, maybe even a PR10, and knol will rank just as high — if not higher — than Wikipedia.

The only problem that Google has right now, which actually isn’t that big of a problem in the large scale of things, is that they don’t have the content ready. But thanks to posts like this one, the world will happily give more money to Google, for free.

It’s a shame that people will lend a hand, for free, and ask for nothing in return.