Wikipedia Competitor Being Tested by Google
SAN FRANCISCO — Google is testing a new Web service intended to become a repository of knowledge from experts on various topics, one that could turn into a competitor to Wikipedia and other sites. — If it attracts a following …
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes a loop that opened a year earlier, when Jimmy Wales announced plans for a Wikia-built search engine to rival Google — a project refined into an editable, community-driven Web search through 2007. A week before this report, commentary was already writing off that effort as doomed to fail. Now Google answers on the other side of the board: rather than defending search, it is testing Knol, a repository of expert-authored pages positioned to compete with Wikipedia itself.
The symmetry matters because both companies are attacking the other's core asset — Wikia going after Google's index, Google after Wikipedia's contributor base. The report also ties Knol to newly launched Google Profiles, which give authors a persistent identity across Google products, and notes industry observers reading it as bad news for Jason Calacanis's Mahalo.
First-order effects
- Frustrated Wikipedia editors are the recruitment target: Knol offers named authorship and byline credit where Wikipedia offers anonymity and edit wars, threatening the volunteer pipeline that produces Wikipedia's content.
- Mahalo's human-curated search pages now compete against a service with Google's traffic, identity infrastructure, and zero marginal cost of experimentation.
Second-order effects
- Wikia's search ambitions face a two-front war — Google's dominance in search plus a Google-owned answer to the wiki content model — raising the bar for the community it needs to attract.
- If Knol pages rank well in Google results, Wikipedia loses its near-monopoly on top-of-page placement for informational queries, pressuring its donation-funded model at the point of discovery.
Third-order effects
- Knowledge production online shifts from a community-owned commons toward named-author pages hosted by the company that also controls the search index — a structural conflict of interest between ranking the web and supplying it.
- Author identity becomes the unit of trust: if Knol's model holds, expertise credentials and profile portability replace collective editing as the web's default signal for reliable information.
The trend: Search platforms are moving from indexing the world's knowledge to commissioning and hosting it themselves, putting Google in direct competition with the communities whose pages it ranks.