Betting Against Google’s Answer to Wikipedia

As many now know, Google announced Fri­day that it’s test­ing a new con­tent ini­tia­tive — dubbed “knol” — that it hopes will rival Wikipedia. Real­iz­ing that Wikipedia entries rank first on 27% of all Google search result pages, the folks at Google­plex could­n’t resist launch­ing a com­pet­i­tive prod­uct. In announc­ing “knol,” the com­pa­ny high­light­ed two prob­lems that this new con­tent prod­uct will address:

1) “There are mil­lions of peo­ple who pos­sess use­ful knowl­edge that they would love to share,” but they don’t share that knowl­edge “because it is not easy enough to do that.”

2) “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.”

How “knol” attempts to solve these prob­lems is fair­ly straight­for­ward. It will pro­vide experts with user-friend­ly tem­plates for writ­ing and pub­lish­ing ency­clo­pe­dia entries (or “knols”) on the web. And since a pic­ture is appar­ent­ly worth a thou­sand words, I rec­om­mend that you take a look at a sam­ple screen­shot here. Depart­ing from Wikipedia, Google’s project will cater to the indi­vid­ual author, not com­mu­ni­ties of authors. And it will encour­age many ency­clo­pe­dia entries on the same top­ic, as opposed to one uni­fied text. Google then assumes that the cream will rise to the top. If 20 peo­ple craft “knols” on “string the­o­ry,” then the best one — pre­sum­ably the one that gets the most links from qual­i­ty sites — will rise high­est in the search rank­ings.

Google’s con­cept is not alto­geth­er bad. But it’s also one of the more ordi­nary ideas to come out of Moun­tain View, and I’m guess­ing that the results will fall short of cor­po­rate expec­ta­tions. Here’s why:

Most fun­da­men­tal­ly, the infor­ma­tion gen­er­at­ed by these “knols” will be sub­stan­dard com­pared to what you’ll find on Wikipedia. Although the screen­shot pro­vid­ed by Google nice­ly fea­tured a Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar writ­ing on “Insom­nia,” the real­i­ty is that few experts of this stature will take the time to con­tribute. Take my word for it. I’ve spent the past five years try­ing to get schol­ars from elite uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, to bring their ideas to the out­side world, and it’s often not their first pri­or­i­ty. They just have too many oth­er things com­pet­ing for their time. More often than not, Google’s knols will be writ­ten by authors with less­er, if not dubi­ous, cre­den­tials. The mediocre entries will be many; the great ones, few. And this will leave Google’s con­tent in a weak­er posi­tion rel­a­tive to Wikipedia.

To be clear, Wikipedi­a’s over­all tal­ent pool may not be much bet­ter. But Wikipedi­a’s mod­el has an impor­tant built-in advan­tage. A com­mu­ni­ty of writ­ers focus­ing on the same text will cor­rect one anoth­er and improve the over­all prod­uct over time. The final text becomes greater than the sum of its authors. Mean­while, Google’s mod­el, which will pro­duce a pro­lif­er­a­tion of lack­lus­ter entries on the same sub­ject, does­n’t include any kind of strong self-cor­rect­ing mech­a­nism that will improve the entries. The com­pa­ny seems to think that user feed­back, name recog­ni­tion, and a share of ad rev­enue (which prob­a­bly won’t amount to much) will do the trick. But that seems like wish­ful think­ing, and I’m bas­ing that on sev­er­al years of work­ing at About.com, which inte­grat­ed many of the same ele­ments into its mod­el. Strike one against Google.

If you’re look­ing for Strikes 2 and 3, let me out­line them briefly.

Strike 2 comes down to false premis­es: When you step back and exam­ine Google’s rea­sons for cre­at­ing project “knol,” they don’t hold up to scruti­ny. These days, pub­lish­ing on the web is fair­ly dum­my proof. Free blog­ging soft­ware, Google Page Cre­ator, Yahoo’s Geoc­i­ties and Wikipedia — these tools have made it incred­i­bly easy to pub­lish to the web. (Some­how, writ­ers have fig­ured out how to post 2,125,453 arti­cles to Wikipedia.) The argu­ment that tech­nol­o­gy is hold­ing back would-be ency­clo­pe­dia writ­ers just does­n’t fly. Nor does the notion that we’d get bet­ter qual­i­ty ency­clo­pe­dia entries if only authors could attach their names to what they write. On the one hand, anonymi­ty has­n’t slowed down Wikipedia at all. On the oth­er, many legit­i­mate experts will see writ­ing “knols” as being a slight step above “van­i­ty” pub­lish­ing, but not much more. In short, not a good use of their time.

Strike 3 turns on momen­tum and the lack of game-chang­ing func­tion­al­i­ty: Not long after YouTube launched and proved the via­bil­i­ty of video shar­ing, Google cre­at­ed its own com­pet­i­tive unit, Google Video. By the next year, Google real­ized it would nev­er catch up and bought YouTube for $1.65 bil­lion. Wikipedia, in com­par­i­son, has had a much longer head start. For six years, it has been refin­ing its mod­el, grow­ing traf­fic, and gain­ing user loy­al­ty. That’s a sub­stan­tial and most like­ly insur­mount­able lead. True, once upon a time a young Google came out of nowhere and knocked an estab­lished Yahoo out of its lead­er­ship role. But that hap­pened when Google brought its game-chang­ing search tech­nol­o­gy to mar­ket. With “knol,” how­ev­er, there’s no such game-chang­ing tech­nol­o­gy on dis­play — noth­ing that sub­stan­tial­ly changes how knowl­edge gets cre­at­ed. Google and its engi­neers cer­tain­ly excel at man­ag­ing knowl­edge and pro­duce many great prod­ucts (for which I’m per­son­al­ly thank­ful). But get­ting into the knowl­edge cre­ation busi­ness may pose new chal­lenges, ones that will require the Google staff to go beyond algo­rithms and think­ing in terms of 0s and 1s.

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