Knol: A way to make better search results

Homeboy Chris Blanc has an interesting, in-depth post concerning Google's Knol, which was announced earlier this week:

When they wanted to take out Microsoft Internet Explorer, they pumped money and developers into Mozilla Firefox, making it as corporate of a project as IE. Result? Many people use it, believing it to be a real alternative, while Google slowly slackens its support into the background.

Finally, Wikipedia: Google needed a way to provide some kind of standard result for any search query, because too many people were spamming. So they encouraged wikipedia, knowing that its content would eventually get out of hand.

Now, they’ve introduced Google Knol, which is a wikipedia clone — except that it’s hybridized with a group blog, and is only open to select contributors. Thinking of Associated Content or Reddit? Yeah, me too.

It’s a good way of acknowledging what Wikipedia tries desperately not to let the world know. Most wikipedia articles are written by relatively few people, maybe 2% of the contributing audience. They are augmented by another 10%-20% of the people there. The rest of the people on Wikipedia perform really obvious monkey tasks like plagiarizing websites that are expert in their area, so the Wikipedia page appears above them in search results. This was basically a giant web real estate grab.

With Knol, Google is starting where Wikipedia left off.

While I think this view is correct, I think we should also consider that Knol is part of an ongoing attempt by Google to control the information going through their search engines. Since last month's massive spam attack, Google has been publically wary of a problem they've known about for some time.