If you thought you had mastered the art of Googling yourself, then hold on tight.
Last week, Google announced a project called Knol. “Knols,” the company tells us, are units of knowledge; one might stumble into a bookstore and complain, “I'm running low on knols. Knol me up!”
The site hasn't even been released yet, except in that mysterious land of private testing, but the very disclosure of its existence has caused a commotion. It has the look on an online encyclopedia, which would make it a direct competitor to Wikipedia, the world's greatest resource on subjects that don't matter. At the end of the day, though, Wikipedia aren't the ones who should be worried.
Knol is simple enough. Google is asking individuals to write up encyclopedia pages on subjects of their choosing – and that's all there is to it. Anyone will be able to write a Knol page, and only authors will be able to edit their own pages. In return, writers will have the option of running Google advertising on their Knol pages.
Competing Knol pages on the same subject might emerge; Google says that “competition of ideas is a good thing,” and appears to be hoping that a user-rating system will sort the good entries from the riff-raff.
“The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors,” wrote Udi Manber, a Google vice-president, announcing the project. Sure enough, in the demonstration page Google released, there was the author's smiling mug, framed in the top right corner.
“We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line,” Manber continued.
It certainly gives all the appearances of being Wikipedia's long-lost twin, its opposite number. It's tempting to read deeply into the fact that Knol is setting out to promote individual experts, rather than mimicking Wikipedia's gong-show collectivism. But I don't think that's the debate at hand. Authority never went away; it just ducked for cover while the “wisdom of crowds” fad blew over.
What Google is really dangling before Knol's putative authors is the same kind of exposure that Wikipedia has been getting this whole time. Indeed, Wikipedia and Google have been dancing a tight little tango for years now. By mid-2005, typing almost any search term into Google would yield a result from Wikipedia in the top few results. This worked out well for both parties: Google became more useful to its users, because whatever your opinion of Wikipedia, it's better than most of the Internet detritus that Google dredges up. Wikipedia, meanwhile, got the readers, attention and credibility that made it a global phenomenon. In many respects, Google made Wikipedia what it is today – and did it pro bono.
So it stands to reason that Google should try to siphon some of that traffic back onto home turf. The more pages of content Google can drum up, the more advertising it can sell. In order for this scheme to work, though, Google will have to give Knol pages good play in its search results, just like Wikipedia gets. If a site doesn't appear in the first few results, hardly anyone visits it.
Yes, one of Google's articles of faith is that it never jury-rigs its search results, but it also tweaks its secret-sauce ranking formula with regularity. I can promise you that it won't sell itself short in the process. Search in Google, get a Knol.
The result will be the online equivalent of a high-prestige address: a pied-à-terre in Google, steps from the top of the search rankings! That's a tempting proposition, especially for someone wanting to make a name for themselves. I can think of one subject on which I'm expert that I'll waste no time writing up for Google Knol: me.
In fact, if Knol turns into the kind of website that one would like to be publicly associated with, the professionally inclined will waste no time in Knolling themselves to take advantage of the Google connection. The place could become autobiography central. When it promises “a forum where professionals can put their reputations on the line,” it sounds less like a Wikipedia competitor and more like a new class of social network: a respectable online identity for Facebook refugees.
Will Knol be a new, professional Facebook? Doubtful; there are already services that cater to that market, and they haven't set the world on fire. It could be something better, though, something altogether new. On Facebook, for instance, nobody else can rightfully claim my identity. But with Knol, a biographer and his subject might put up competing pages with differing takes on reality, but equal claims of being definitive.
For a while, private social networks like Facebook looked like they were about to displace Google as the centre of the online universe. We now talk of “Facebooking” people instead of Googling them, for the simple reason that half the action these days is on social networks. Faces are engaging and immediate and informative, but Facebook's member directory was a private garden that Google couldn't peek into. (This is changing, though: Facebook is now allowing Google to search its directory.) Knol, however, might drag compelling new content back into the open – the kind that's not just information crafted by aliases, but the kind that comes with the small human dramas of a face and name. Google has released duds before, but Knol could give it something worth searching for.
