Knol

» see knol.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

knol was google's attempt to build wikipedia by paying experts to write under their real names instead of letting strangers edit collaboratively. it launched on july 23, 2008 with a few hundred articles, mostly health and medical. a knol was supposed to mean a "unit of knowledge." the pitch was that authoritative bylines would solve wikipedia's reliability problem. the actual problem turned out to be that wikipedia did not have a reliability problem readers cared about.

google ran knol for almost four years before quietly closing it on april 30, 2012. by mid-2009 the site was getting around 175,000 monthly views. wikipedia at the same moment was doing billions. there was an extended period in 2010 when knol was simply down for days, and google did not seem to notice until journalists pointed it out. by the time the closure announcement came it was a paperwork formality.

the project failed in the same way most of google's social and content swings failed in that period. it tried to graft a one-author authority model onto a medium that had already settled on collaborative editing as the cheaper path to scale. wikipedia was already too far ahead. authors paid by ad-revenue share were not the kind of authors anybody actually wanted to read on a topic. knol's articles tended toward the medium-quality essay format you would get if you asked a doctor to write a blog post in their off-hours.

i was a computer engineering student in 2008 when knol launched. it showed up in tech news that summer as the wikipedia-killer of the moment. i think i opened knol exactly twice. neither result beat the wikipedia version of whatever i was looking for, and i went back to the tab i already had open. that was, as far as i can tell, the standard relationship people had with the product.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

the founding idea, written up by udi manber and announced in december 2007, was that wikipedia's anonymous-edit model produced articles "you cannot trust because you do not know who wrote them." knol would solve this by attaching a single named expert to each article. the expert kept editorial control. multiple experts could each publish their own knol on the same topic, and readers could compare. revenue from adsense ads on the article would be shared with the author.

~ why it did not catch on ~

the model assumed experts would write for adsense pennies. they mostly did not. the knol article on a given topic was usually one earnest doctor's blog post pasted in, ranking far below the wikipedia version on google itself. nobody ever explained why the experts who would write a free authoritative article on, say, ankle sprain treatment, would not just edit wikipedia. the answer is they did, and that was where the work went.

~ the long tail ~

google migrated some knol content into a tool called annotum after shutdown, mostly so the few academic users who had bothered to write there had somewhere to land. annotum is also gone now. the closest spiritual descendant is google's later push into "featured snippets" and the knowledge graph, where google itself sits between the user and the content rather than running an authored site of its own. that is a more honest version of the same impulse.

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