The Font of All Knol

Google's Wikipedia beater, Knol has lurched into the public view with all the finesse of Google's Beta releases. It's harsh to complain about the relatively few small bugs in this otherwise very well presented web service. Like most Google products, Knol is slick and professional. The handful of distressingly disruptive bugs that existed at launch have been quickly addressed. Knol appears to be another successful Google 'experiment'.

However, in directly engaging users to produce content I suspect Google have come up against something slightly unexpected. Their algorithmic focus on efficient search, indexing and user profiling has perhaps left them with a blind spot when it comes to social interactions. Certainly, when user content is the be-all and end-all of a web site, you're no longer in the realms of inert data. Instead you're in the land of social software and at the mercy of the annoying behaviour of a crowd of untamed users. In short, a slick service can still suffer from big useability problems.

From the idealistic point of view of providing useful information, Knol suffers from organisational issues. Individual Knols (Google's term for an article about a specific subject) exist in isolation. Without subject areas, categories and a convenient way to interlink related Knols, articles have to either attempt to cover a subject in one long, breathless page or take small bite-size chunks and leave the user to make the connections. Given that many authors can tackle a subject area, the task of connecting related material is as big a research effort as writing a Knol itself. At present the user is left with that research to do for themselves. The end effect is that rather than providing easy access to information, Knol challenges the user to make sense of the many clamouring voices.

In making the reader work for their information, Knol doesn't provide easy access to knowledge, nor does it welcome the casual visitor with a browsing experience that might draw them into the site. Coming across a Knol doesn't encourage the reader to explore further, stumble upon related articles or compare with alternative viewpoints. The breadth of a subject area remains hidden and the visitor remains unengaged. In this case the sum of all Knol is less than the sum of it's parts.

The other issue that Knol appears to be dealing with is the far more base desires of the (content generating) public. Knol provides a public stage that has some authority just through association with Google. The theory goes that a Knol will have some priority in Google searches as they attempt to keep browsing users within the Googlesphere. Browsing users equate to all important revenue as Google can serve up adverts so long as those users remain on Google's own web pages. Knol authors can also benefit from ad revenue through the Adsense programme.

Unfortunately, whilst Google struggles to 'do no evil', their users are not necessarily so morally inclined. The profit and self-promotion that Knol offers encourages people to try to game the system. As a result, the first few weeks of Knol's public launch have seen numerous articles ripped wholesale from other sources in an attempt to gain ad revenue. Popular search terms have been quickly Knolled (if you forgive the verbification), largely by copying Wikipedia and IMDB articles verbatim. Other entrepreneurially minded individuals have mass produced brief product reviews that conveniently link to affiliate sites selling those products. Knol's position within the Google universe encourages spam.

No one could claim that this sort of misuse has come as a surprise to Google. From launch, Knol was able to identify similar content that existed elsewhere on the web. It also provides a comprehensive system for complaining about content. What does seem to have surprised the Knol team is the sheer volume of articles that are less than altruistic in sharing the author's knowledge. Policing Knols appears to be giving them quite a challenge. At the time of writing it seems that Knols abusing the system can remain in place for quite some time before they are removed.

Perhaps most significant is the fact that Google's main search index of their own site does not appear to have been updated in a couple of weeks. Search Google for a topic that is covered in a Knol and you're fairly unlikely to find it. Search on the Knol site itself and you'll have more luck, but it seems that Google have lost a little confidence in their project for the moment. Reading between the lines you might assume that until they are confident that Knols are going to be reliably informative rather than spam, Google are delaying bringing Knols to the attention of the wider searching public.

I have to say I like the site. I've experimented in writing a couple of articles (you can read my enthusiasm for Canon's 450D here). As an author the experience is good, and Knols are very nicely presented to the reader. When Google overcome the current issues - and I have no doubt that they will do so - Wikipedia will have a strong competitor. Right now though the ubiquitous Beta status of Google's product is perhaps more deserved than usual, and not for the quality of the software beneath the site.