Google Knol Prediction Revisited

Back in Decem­ber 2007, I made a bet against Google Knol, the search giant’s answer to Wikipedia. In a fair­ly involved piece, I list­ed three rea­sons why Knol would­n’t upend Wikipedia. Now fast for­ward 18+ months: Tech Crunch has report­ed that Knol’s traf­fic is trend­ing down. It peaked in Feb­ru­ary at around 320,000 vis­i­tors per month, accord­ing to Quant­cast esti­mates. Now it’s at around 174,000. (See the graph here.) The bot­tom line? You can’t win at every­thing. But for­tu­nate­ly there’s some good new things com­ing out of Google, and we’ll be men­tion­ing them in the com­ing days.

PS In case you did­n’t hear, Wikipedia is start­ing to put edi­to­r­i­al restric­tions on cer­tain entries. The lais­sez-faire days are com­ing to an end.


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  • Carl says:

    The Knol might not be dead yet. PLoS has recent­ly begun col­lab­o­rat­ing with Knol: http://knol.google.com/k/plos/plos-currents-influenza/28qm4w0q65e4w/1%23#. I can see a time in the near future where peo­ple who pub­lish in PLoS will be encour­aged, if not required, to sub­mit a Knol to Google as well. Will oth­er sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals fol­low suit?

  • Narayana Rao says:

    Accord­ing to my esti­mate week­ly page views of knol are now 1.5 mil­lion per week. By August 2010, they will reach one mil­lion per day and knol will reach a breakeven page view lev­el. More and more authors are reg­is­ter­ing on knol. More authors are com­mit­ting them­selves active­ly to knol.

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