Is it failing? I think it's a little late for that question. More like "why did it fail?"
I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your net wide, devote a small amount of resources to a bunch of products and hope some of them take off. That's what Knol is part of and that's fine. Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.
Given that I consider articles like this to be exactly the level of mockery they deserve.
Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.
Yes. But there was probably too much corporate inertia to shut it down within forty-eight hours after it was opened to public posting, by which time it was a huge embarrassment.
As giant corporations go, I like Google. Their business model mostly involves giving us more. Still, I am happy to see this "Wikipedia-killer" dead.
Wikipedia is both great and terrible. It both "very unreliable" and about as reliable as one gets in any first blush look at given subject. Certainly, to many experts it is an embarrassment and, worse, a threat. But that's often as not because even expert opinion is divided in many fields and Wikipedia doesn't prevent well supported dissident opinion from being entirely suppressed. Certainly, no should quote Wikipedia in print without further research but it's a great place to start that research.
God, I hope they shut it down. It was immediately populated by SEO freaks who kept looking at PR flowing from a google.com domain. And it made me feel like I had to do it, and I hate doing shit purely for SEO reasons.
Google just needs to downrank Wikipedia a little and it fails. I guess Google Knol will sooner or later rank above Wikipedia. We all know that Eric Schmidt has denied that "don't be evil" has been ever an official motto of his corporation.
Sorry, but Google Knol does not and probably will never match Wikipedia for sheer scope and variety of content. You can't outrank Wikipedia if you aren't even competing with it.
Knol has ~300,000 articles in total, many of which are instructional on specific subtopics. Wikipedia has 3 million articles in English on every topic. Not only is Wikipedia much bigger, it also has a more specific focus (creating an encyclopedia).
I understand the nature of a company like Google is to cast your net wide, devote a small amount of resources to a bunch of products and hope some of them take off. That's what Knol is part of and that's fine. Google's mistake has been not improving or shutting it down before it became an embarrassment.
Given that I consider articles like this to be exactly the level of mockery they deserve.