When Google's vision loses focus.
As you may have heard, Google recently announced Knol – a new tool that enables experts to write pages (knols: units of knowledge) on their particular subjects. Seen from one perspective, it feels very aligned with Google’s mission:
as well as consistent with other initiatives like blogger for instance. Indeed, on their blog, Google position it simply as an extension of this very same mission:
However, there’s something about this initiative that doesn’t sit quite right with me. It’s not so much that it’s a direct attack upon Wikipedia and Wikia. Instead, it’s that this brings Google into a quite different business.
It’s the inclusion of various phrases within their blog:
“….we started inviting a selected group of people…”
“A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”
“Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.”
Now, to be fair to them, Google clearly state that:
“Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.”
However, it feels that a line has been crossed very subtly from simply organising information to evaluating information. And without doubt Google are now in the business of generating information:
“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.”
Wikipedia articles routinely rank at the top of search results on many topics and therefore the benefit to Google of owning these results is clear. This turns what could be an innocent move into a new but related area into something that (again) feels much more cynical. It is reminiscent of Microsoft’s declaration that more and more functionality ought to reside within the OS. It feels protective rather than empowering. But maybe I’m over reacting?