What happened to Knol? Announced by Google in late 2007 and launched in July 2008, the site was meant to bring more credible (read: not written by anonymous Wikipedians) "knowledge units" to the web, and it would allow the authors to cash in on their work. But it's 2009, and Knol appears to be notable largely for its non-notability.

First, the good news. Knol users have already published more than 100,000 pieces of knowledge and the project has a (shockingly) quick schedule of incremental releases. According to the Knolologists of Google, "people visit Knol from 197 countries and territories on an average day, from the Aland Islands and Antarctica to Zambia and Zimbabwe."

Now the bad news: no one's reading the site, and it's awash in poor content.

Knol-body is reading

Traffic for Knol has certainly posed no danger to Wikipedia's position atop most Google search results, as some feared when Knol was first deployed. Indeed, it's rare enough to see a Knol article on the first page of results, and a scan through various Knol pages reinforces this impression of generally low visibility. Even a long, detailed article on IPv6—the sort of thing that would seem to be a natural fit for Knol—attracts only a handful of pageviews a week, with a mere 327 total pageviews. (Wikipedia's entry is number two on the list; Ars has a piece at number nine, but Knol is MIA.)



Some of Knol's hottest stories; who knew there was so much to say about intestinal bleeding?

Indeed, the numbers are low enough that more than 50 pageviews a week appears to put an article in an elite club. Not even "7 Steps to Create Massive Traffic to Your Site" can generate more than a handful of pageviews.

As for the quality of the content, Google's attempt at monetizing (both for itself and for its authors) the Knol entries has had a perverse effect. While it has attracted plenty of detailed commentary from learned professionals, it's drowning in plenty more that is basically spam, plagiarism, or a stub, thrown up in the apparent hope of making some quick cash. (Though because of point number one, that's not happening, either.)

At least Google is aware of the problem and has provided rating and review tools to catch questionable, illegal, or merely bad content. But problems remain.

Dueling Obamas

Take "Barack Obama," for instance. A search for his name brings up 809 entries; since most Knol users appear to write their own entries rather than add to others (for which no compensation is forthcoming), the proliferation of entries is inevitable. And it's not at all clear that the best ones are rising to the top.

The first Obama entry is skeletal, the second and third more substantive but largely reprising the same facts, while the fourth was written by someone who identifies himself as a "Wisdom (brain) coach, President of research foundation, solver of the mystery of wisdom, antique dealer, inventor, knoler, solver of the mystery why the sperm is tiny and the womens [sic] egg is huge." While this sounds like someone I would love to know more about, I'm quite sure that his entry on Obama will be less helpful (as it turns out to be) than the Wikipedia entry on Obama.



Knol has "niche" content down

Other posts, while interesting, appear to be cut-and-paste jobs from a company brochure or HTML versions of existing works, such as the US Army Survival Manual.

In the cases where the content is more impressive and (apparently) original, it tends to be ultra-specialized, as in this ridiculously complete breakdown of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

It's already becoming clear, though, that Knol is evolving away from any sort of "Google Wikipedia." Many of its pieces are not straight-up descriptions of some event or person or topic, but "how-to" pieces on a huge variety of bizarre subjects. There is, for example, an entire Knol devoted to "Horniness; a spreading epidemic that must be stopped." It is written for "the young people who are just coming of age and those who are heading towards horniness, those who are border line horny and those who are already stuck," and it's by the "Wisdom (brain) coach" listed above.

More mainstream writers have tackled proofreading, spotting fake sports cards, four-season family camping, and breastfeeding while in the office. While different in focus from projects like Wikipedia and Citizendium, this "how-to" aspect of Knol could certainly position the service as more of a competitor to sites like eHow.com.

With its mix of philosophical rants, Wikipedia-style entries, and how-to pieces, Knol feels unfocused, certainly not the kind of site designed for browsing. Some individual entries do decently (a walkthrough of the video game Gun appeared on the first page of Google search results for "Gun walkthrough"), but most struggle for traction and high-profile "name" writers are largely missing.

It's early in Knol's development and, with the resources of a company like Google behind it, the project might stick around until it becomes a niche hit like Orkut—huge in Brazil, but nearly unknown elsewhere. At the moment, though, Knol is struggling up a knoll of its own, and the top isn't yet in sight.