Google continues to trim down its product line as part of the company’s new “focus”. The Internet giant announced that it is closing down some more of them, and some functionalities of others. Google Wave. You may have already thought …

Last year, a Google patent application was released for “Identifying inadequate search content“.  This is described as, “systems and methods for identifying inadequate search content are provided. Inadequate search content, for example, can be identified based on statistics associated with …

Now that Google is putting Google Profiles in search results, you might want to consider getting verified. You have to go through a process to do this however.

"Should you get a verified name? Right now, it doesn’t influence whether your profile will rank better in profile results," says Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land. "But if you’re trying to convince people to trust that the page is really controlled by you, it probably makes sense."

It seems that Google didn’t miss Knol by accident when the company was killing Dodgeball, Jaiku, and other services two weeks ago.  Matt Cutts has stepped forward to defend the would-be Wikipedia competitor, and a new contest aims to spark a bit of interest in it.

Knol is a service from Google that lets people write "authoritative articles about specific topics." Recently, the 100,000th "knol" was published since the service’s launch in July.

Google’s Knol isn’t doing so well.  Despite being portrayed by some outsiders as a would-be Wikipedia-killer, the knowledge-sharing site has been more or less ignored since its launch.  Google’s solution: launch it again, this time in German, Italian, and French.

Author and search optimization expert Aaron Wall headed to Google’s Knol, as did many SEO professionals, to create a page. He doesn’t sound happy about what he found.

Some people noticed Knol articles are already sometimes ranking very well in Google results, even though Google promised Knol articles wouldn’t get any artificial boost.

Well-respected search pundit Danny Sullivan put the newly-launched Google Knol to the test, to see if contributed pages found their way into a top-ten placement in Google’s search results.

Google went live with Knol, a platform to read and write articles on all kinds of subjects. Knol was being tested privately since some time and had been pre-announced back in 2007. The address is knol.google.com, but notably not knol.com or knol.org or even googleknol.com. This project is somewhat reminiscent of Wikipedia, though there are many differences as well.

We’ve noted time and time again the way in which Wikipedia receives loads of traffic from Google, and to be honest, there’s no clear sign that this will change.  But Google has gone so far as to launch Knol, a sort of would-be competitor.

The web levels the playing field, allowing individuals to compete with larger corporations, largely through the smaller players making dirt public and launching viral marketing campaigns around issues. Because there is a publisher publishing every opinion and angle, it is easy to discount just about everything, especially attempts for new market participants to become remarkable.

Call it a unit of knowledge, but beware of calling it a ‘knol’, as Google has applied to trademark the term.

Anil Dash, blogger and Six Apart employee, argues that Google has fundamental problems with creating good editing tools because they can’t really put themselves in the mind of the end user.