Google announced a few days ago its vision to essentially mash together a Wikipedia like site with a Squidoo layout essentially desiring to have a competitive online encyclopedia that has ads. Beyond the horrible name, this product may come to haunt Google in the long-run becoming a turning point its perceived status as an honest company into a monopolistic corporation similarly to Microsoft.

Google Knol essentially could take down the major content providers such as Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages, Yahoo Answers, etc. as it will naturally be ‘algorithmically’ favored by the grand ‘artificial intelligence’ of Google—just as Youtube currently is for videos. Competition for ad revenue will drive a lot of people to copy millions of text from across the web creating duplicate content issues that Google still cannot detect through its ‘artificial intelligence’ particularly with RSS feeds, in turn creating complaints of infringements on copywriting.


From a basic business aspect, what Google is doing makes complete sense—it worked beautifully in Korea with Naver by owning content that many Koreans actually used, effectively creating a huge barrier to entry for any new search engines, even for Google Korea. Yahoo’s Answers are similar in scope, but was never (and still is not) used effectively enough to really help people search for what they want in forms of questions.

This said, Google’s Knol project is a fundamentally bad idea as it turns Google from a perceived search engine into not only a content provider, but a corporation that begins to control what you see and what is worth seeing. The problem I see for Google in the long-term is that its results begin to turn away from what people create on a variety of websites and into what people create all on Google’s own products.

So what does this mean? Mainly you will begin to see Google’s search results showing only Google Products above the fold. Imagine someone searching on “Mexican jumping beans”; you will have Google Image search at the top, followed by two creative Youtube videos of Mexican jumping beans doing something odd, then two Google Knol’s pages all about Mexican jumping beans and other bean varieties.

Does that sound at all to you like a truely organic search result anymore?