Examining Google Knol

Google’s toolbox keeps getting bigger. Search, maps, mail, advertising, analytics… Apparently world domination is best approached one convenient web service at a time.

This morning brought Google Knol, a service bearing more than a passing resemblance to Wikipedia. The name comes from a “unit of knowledge”, which sounds faintly scientific and considerably better than calling it Google Stuff People Wrote. I generally try to greet new ideas with optimism. Or at least without immediately reaching for the flamethrower. But Knol made me curious.

Once upon a time, Google was just four empty hands, a search engine and a refreshingly uncluttered homepage. Now it is the enormous creature sitting quietly in the corner of the Internet, knowing what you searched for, what you clicked and probably what you had for breakfast.

So if Google decides to build something resembling a Wikipedia killer, you might reasonably expect its pages to be magnificent specimens of search-engine optimization. Lean markup. Clean URLs. Semantic perfection. Pages lovingly engineered to make Googlebot purr like a well-fed cat.

Apparently not. Pick a random Knol page and the picture gets ugly rather quickly. A transitional doctype, 24 validation errors, font elements shambling around like undead relics from 1997, and URLs with all the elegance of a drunken bureaucrat filling out a tax form. Wikipedia, by comparison, manages perfectly readable URLs without breaking into a sweat.

And yet, despite all this technical debris, Knol pages seem to perform remarkably well in Google’s search results. Funny, that. Perhaps it is entirely innocent. Perhaps being hosted on a Google subdomain, with the humongous gravitational pull of google.com behind it, just happens to give Knol a little extra spring in its step. Or perhaps the algorithm simply recognizes family.

Either way, when Google owns the search engine, writes the rules by which websites compete for visibility, and then starts publishing its own competing content, you don’t need a conspiracy theory to feel slightly uncomfortable. You just need a functioning nose. And I don’t particularly like the smell.