I just thought of a way that Knol could make it. Google tracks our searches. This is common knowledge. If you don’t regularly clear out your cookies Google knows a lot about what your search habits are. Heck, they probably track IP addresses, so they know anyway. So, yeah, it’s a fact and you can get over it now. Google could use this, though to recruit authors for Knol. Thing is, what the internet needs are the very, very niche topics written about. You want to know a good couple-page bio on G. W. Bush? Wikipidea. That place is great for shit like that. You want to know about Singular Value Decompositions and how that could be used to approximate multi-dimensional data on a 2D plane? Good luck, Tonto. I tried that a few months ago and nearly went crazy doing so. Anyhow, now I know the answer. Google can probably guess what very niche topics you know something about (based on your niche searches) and what niche topics need to be filled out on the internet (based on unresolved searches). Heck, Google can probably even gauge your intelligence (especially if they do some semantic analysis of your Gmail emails). If Google can guess this, then they could, theoretically invite you to write Knols on things they’re pretty sure you may know and things that they know they need knols written on. They even know how valuable knols are to them and could maybe pony up some of that adwords cash up front, hear me? Holla.

Google’s new Wikipedia competition misses several at-bats. The three draws the Knol team has for the site that I’ve heard mentioned are:

1) you’ll get credit for writing the article.

Okay, how is that different from just putting something on your own website?

2) you can get money from the AdSense ads on the page.

Okay, how is that different from putting ads on your website that now hosts your article?

3) People will have an altruistic urge to benefit humanity.

Uh, no, they won’t.

And my final reason why Knol will fail is that there’s no obvious reason to use it. Either contribute to Wikipedia or post your own article on your blog.

If Google really wishes to aid search, they’d bring back Google Answers. There if people had really specific questions they could place bids and though they paid for the answer, the answers were then publicly available.