Encouraging people to contribute knowledge
Posted on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 @ 22:16:53 GMT by vlad
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Posted by Udi Manber, VP Engineering
The
web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped
to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty
good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything
well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of
people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and
there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that
many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy
enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric
was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our
main goal.
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to
try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a
unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a
particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool
is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing.
For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with
everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
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.
A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the
first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will
want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from
scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and
historical, to entertainment, from product information, to
how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor
in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial
responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that
knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who
will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write.
For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same
subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.
Knols will
include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments,
questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to
rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references
and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a
knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will
provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of
those ads.
Once testing is completed, participation in knols
will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be
of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols
appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite
experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will
be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to
substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.
We do not
want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as
widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of
this content and will make that content available to any other search
engine.
As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an
example of a knol is below (double-click on the image to see the page
in full). The main content is real, and we encourage you to read it
(you may sleep better afterwards!), but most of the meta-data -- like
reviews, ratings, and comments -- are not real, because, of course,
this has not been in the public eye as yet. Again, this is a
preliminary version.
Source: Official Google blog
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