Google is creating its own version of the communally-built online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Okay, Matt Cutts failed to buy the Wikipedia webmasters out.A posting at Google's website say that the Internet search giant is inviting chosen people to test a free service dubbed "knol," to indicate a unit of knowledge. "Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," the post adds.
"There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it."
Doing away from becoming a clone, Google is inviting folks to author their own articles instead of following the Wikipedia model. Wikipedia lets visitors make changes to its pages, trusting that community effort is the best way to verify and correct published information.
Pictures of authors will be displayed on their knol web pages, according to a sample provided by Google.
"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," Google posts.
Wikipedia is consistently ranked among the world's top ten most popular websites by Internet research firms Hitwise and comScore. I was foreseeing Google to do a "questions and answers" service similar to Yahoo's and Answers.com. It seems the Wikipedia impact takes the greater priority.
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