Before I begin I have a confession - I am a Google fan through-and-through. It’s natural results have become the benchmark of the search industry. The results are relevant, it’s intuitive and quick to use and I can’t find a better alternative. But I am also a fan of Wikipedia and Knol worries me.
It’s a no-brainer right? Let’s monetise, sorry ‘organise’, the world’s information.
Since the phenomenal success of the most effective new advertising system for a century, Google Adwords, search engines have been monetising every bit of real estate they can lay their hands on. Yahoo! decided that it’s ‘natural’ results could be bought by advertisers using it’s ‘feed’ system, and everyone tried placing CPC adverts in a variety of locations. Natural results in Google, however, have been left largely untouched and advert-free.
Hmm, well Google does place news, images and videos (via youtube) within the search results - all of which have differing degrees of Adwords penetration. Late last week our friends at Mountain View added a new way of getting into their own search results via Knol. Details as yet are thin on the ground, but we know that select authors are being invited to write articles within their area of expertise ‘to find a way to help people share their knowledge‘… Sounds like a more ivory tower like version of Wikipedia to me.. But with Adwords, and close to the top of the natural results guaranteed?
The guys are Techcrunch are debating this under the heading ‘Google knol a step too far?’ It’s worth a look.
Personally I think that Google will make Knol earn it’s place in natural results fairly but at a cost to commercially orientated websites, many of which have been forced to invest more into the Adwords campaigns over the past few years as a result of algorithm tweaks…
The process of organising the world’s information just got a bit more lucrative, I think.
December 19th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
It\’s definitely an interesting development, but I wonder if too much is being made over it at present. I think the key issue for me is that it is a competitive, rather than a collaborative, exercise. Google seems to want to deal with Wikipedia\’s popularity by diluting its authority, providing many alternatives that people can use to get their information. The multiple pages gives multiple revenue streams via advertising as well, so Google solves two problems in one go - too much Wikipedia in the results pages, and not enough in the way of revenue from general knowledge queries.
I\’m not entirely convinced that this is going to work. Without Wikipedia\’s moderation system - which suffers from many problems of its own, admittedly - this seems to be an open invitation to black hat spammers to start trying to flood the results themselves. Unless we\’re seeing the beginnings of a real push for the semantic web replacing link equity as the prime ranking metric, I don\’t see how this can cause a major change. Still, it\’ll be fun to find out :).