Fill out this form to email this article to a friend
Google starts site to take on Wikipedia
With the site, called Knol, Google may be able to keep more users from navigating away.
By Times wires
Published December 15, 2007
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Google Inc., owner of the most-popular Internet search engine, started a Web site that will compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where users contribute and edit entries. The site is called Knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge, the company said Thursday on its blog. Google invited a selected group of users to start testing the site this week. Wikipedia, created in 2001 by St. Petersburg's Jimmy Wales, has become the eighth most-visited U.S. Web site, according to data for October from ComScore Inc. In challenging Wikipedia, Google is taking on a site that claims 75,000 active contributors working on 9-million articles in more than 250 languages. "Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," Udi Manber, a Google vice president, wrote on the blog. "A Knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read." Wikipedia benefits from Google's search engine, which is designed to send users to the sites most relevant to their query. For example, a Google search for Barack Obama provides a link to a Wikipedia page just below the link to his own Web site. Google's product may allow the company to keep more users on its own site, the second most-visited in the United States, rather than sending them to Wikipedia and elsewhere. Google gets 99 percent of its more than $10-billion in annual sales from online advertising, mostly by selling sponsored text links on its own pages and partner sites. In a Friday interview, Wales downplayed Google's latest move. "Google does a lot of cool stuff, but a lot of that cool stuff doesn't work out so great," he said. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., had 131.6-million U.S. visitors in October, more than double Wikipedia's 56.1-million, ComScore said.
[Last modified December 14, 2007, 23:28:55]
Share your thoughts on this story
|
News
Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
Print
Email story
Comment
Letter to the editor
