Google Knol (A unit of power???)

by James Poole on July 26, 2008

So been a week since Knol was officially launched as Google’s answer to the mighty Wikipedia.
My first impressions of the site are it looks very poorly designed and the navigation around the site is terrible, it has more of a squidoo feel to it than Wikipedia which each page having one specific author and i think Google are going for a much more community based feel to the site.

For webmasters i don’t see a lot of initial potential apart from direct traffic from the page until they start putting ads on which the author will get a share of, The links in the content are all no follow so theirs no real benefit there.

Knol’s will get a lot of organic traffic from Google searches, why? because its google’s!! and they can do pretty much what they want to.
Take for example some random searches
http://www.google.com/search?q=Pediatric+Sports+Injuries&pws=0&gl 2nd
http://www.google.com/search?q=Facial+Cosmetic+Enhancement&pws=0&gl 1st

How many other sites could rank that highly and that quickly?
The worry is Google will abuse its position and kill a lot of smaller sites by bumping up Knol pages to the top.

I know some of you will disagree and say there just there to make money, For me Google is search and it is the internet, Google is the first page most people will open the browser to, Take Firefox for example which over 30% of internet users are using now.
There default search is done with Google which means the average user has no real option but to use Google. My girlfriend doesn’t understand that there are other ways to search which is probably true to a lot of average internet users so it gives Google a huge advantage.

It will be interesting to see over the coming weeks and months how Knol pages rank in google and how the advertising structure will work.

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