Google Adsense College

Posted by Udi Manber, VP
Engineering

The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has
helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing
pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is
everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. 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. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today
simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge
posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help
people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people
to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which
stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who
know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about
it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first
phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we
wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind
this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. 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. We believe that knowing who wrote what will
significantly help users make better use of web content. At the
heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol"
as the name of the project and as an instance of an article
interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a
distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google
will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and
it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to
write; we'll do the rest.

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.
The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific
concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical,
to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it
instructions. 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.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to
submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on.
Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols
will also include references and links to additional information.
At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an
author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with
substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be
completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of
high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols
appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are
quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident
that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the
potential to substantially increase the dissemination of
knowledge.

We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to
disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any
exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content
available to any other search engine.

As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an example of a
knol is below (click on the image twice to see the page in full).
The main content is real, and we encourage you to read it (you may
sleep better afterwards!), but most of the meta-data — like
reviews, ratings, and comments — are not real, because, of course,
this has not been in the public eye as yet. Again, this is a
preliminary version.

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"
href="http://www.google.com/help/knol_screenshot.html" > border="0" alt=""
id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5143633654863762834" />

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