Google Wave. You may have already thought it was dead. The company announced that it would no longer develop for it over a year ago. Starting January 31, however, it will become read-only, and users won’t be able to create new waves any longer. Users will still be able to export individual waves, using PDF export until the service is turned off. Google notes that Apache Wave and Walkaround are still available. These are open source projects that utilize Wave’s technology.

Knol is making a transition. Google’s Urs Hölzle explains, “We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.”

WordPress.com’s Ryan Markel writes:

Starting today, those same authors can move their articles and collaborative journals to WordPress—and they have the power to choose whether to move to a self-hosted WordPress installation powered by the freely-available, open-source Annotum themes, or to have their Annotum-powered site hosted for free here on WordPress.com. Knol will slowly shut down over the next year, and we’ve worked closely with Google, Solvitor LLC, and Crowd Favorite to make this transition as simple as possible.

We here at WordPress.com are thrilled to provide an easy, fast way for Knol authors to move to their new homes without the need for configuring their own installation. And WordPress.com users who would like to start new sites powered by the Annotum platform can activate one of the two new Annotum-enabled themes on new blogs and get started right away. It’s yet another way the WordPress platform and WordPress.com are enabling the democratization of publishing and sharing of information with the world.

Google Bookmarks Lists will end on December 19. Bookmarks within the lists will be retained and labeled.

Google Friend Connect is being retired on March 1. Google wants people to use Google+ instead. Makes sense.

Google Gears-based Calendars and Gmail will no longer be supported at the beginning of December, and then later in December, Gears will no longer be available for download.

The Google Search Timeline is going away. “We’re removing this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page,” says Hölzle.

Finally, Google has closed its efforts on the “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal” project. It says other institutions are in a better position than Google to take on the research, but Google has published its results, and continues to invest in renewable energy.

Bill Slawski, who frequently writes about Google patents, discussed this last summer, talking about how Google might suggest topics for users to write about. It sounds a little like Demand Media’s model doesn’t it?

Patrick Altoft gets credit for bringing this back into the conversation, in light of Google’s Panda update, which came down hard on some sites often referred to as content farms (though not so much on Demand Media’s eHow, interestingly enough). He suggests some ways that Google could go about implementing such a system, including: selling story ideas to publishers, working with partners to get them to write content, giving the data away in their keyword research tool, creating an aggregation system similar to how reviews are pulled into Google Places,  or adding wiki style user contributions sections to search results.

Google has historically not been in the business of creating content, and I wouldn’t expect them to go that route now. The wiki idea is interesting. Wikis seem to have done pretty well against the Panda update. wikiHow was one of the top winners according to some reports.

Google does have the wiki-like Knol, which is still in beta. What if Google started promoting it more aggressively, and integrated the system described in this patent to help push it beyond beta status?

Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo has a feature called the zero-click result, which is similar to some of the instant answer-type results Google gives. DDG recently added wikiHow to the list of sites whose content is displayed in this type of result. What if Google followed suit, but with its own wiki-style results based on topics it suggested itself? Who knows where Google’s gaps are better than Google?

Here’s an interesting quote from Google’s Udi Manber, all the way back in 2007: “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. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. ” (emphasis added)

Manber added, “Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.”

Currently, anyone can try to edit a knol post, and the changes are sent as suggestions to the post’s author. They can then either be accepted or rejected. It’s a bit different than the traditional wiki, but there are some pretty obvious similarities.

In some people’s eyes, there’s a pretty fine line between wikis and content farms. We’ve spoken with wikiHow founder Jack Herrick (who also ran eHow before selling to Demand Media) about the quality differences between the two types of sites. His analysis is worth reading if you’re interested in that.

If Google implemented such a system, it would no doubt be the target of a great deal of criticism, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t do it.

Who knows what Google’s actual plans are with this patent? Either way,  it’s an interesting topic of discussion. Perhaps the real question is what SHOULD Google do with this? A gap in quality search results is a gap. It’s hard to say that content from a content farm isn’t better than no relevant content whatsoever. How would you like to see the gaps filled?

"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."

Danny has a great article up looking at the ins and outs of Google Profiles, where he also discusses verification. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable however puts it into an easier step-by-step format:

1. You must go to Google’s Knol site and sign in.
2. Then go to your profile settings.
3.  Click on the "Name Verification" tab
4.  Then choose to verify by phone or via credit card

So basically, you’re not getting verified without giving up a little personal info, which should be a hot topic among those people who frequently criticize Google on privacy. Still, they’ve got to make sure it’s really you one way or another don’t they? And it’s not like you have to get verified.

I have not done this, and my profile is the only one showing up in a search for my name at this point, so I’m not too worried about it. That may change in the future, but for now, I’m good.

You can still verify other email addresses with your Google account right from your profile (no going to Knol or anything). When you go to edit your profile, you’ll see a link for "verify an email address" in the middle of the page under the "Verified Domains" heading. However, if you have an email address that is associated with a different Google account, you will be unable to verify it.

Would you be willing to give Google your phone number or credit card information to get your profile verified? Tell us why or why not.

How important do you think it is to get your profile verified? Share your thoughts with WPN readers.

Cutts started by bringing up the 100,000-article mark that Knol recently hit.  He noted on his blog that, even if the number sounds insignificant next to Wikipedia’s 2.7 million pages, "Mashable made a point that ‘it took Wikipedia almost two years to reach a similar number of pages.’"

 

Cutts then continued, "Some of the ways I’ve learned to estimate whether a team will be successful is how high-impact their project is, but also 1) how quickly they can iterate and 2) how they react to feedback.  I consider the Google Chrome team very successful . . . .  They roll out a new version of Chrome about once a week, and I see them pay attention and prioritize based on feedback. . . .  Knol has more polish, more features, and the team has listened to the outside world when they plan what to work on next."

If you’re interested in giving Knol another chance, then, Google and the site tied to the "For Dummies" book line have arranged a little incentive.  Five people who enter the Knol for Dummies contest will have their entries featured on Dummies.com, while one grand prize winner will get $1,000.  All that’s required of participants is that they submit typical Knol how-to articles before March 23rd.

It should be interesting to see what Knol’s article count looks like when the promotion is done.

Google has put up a blog post about the progress that has come along with Knol in its first five months of public beta. Product Manager Cedric Dupont and Software Engineer Michael McNally write:

The Knol interface is now available in eight languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish) and we are excited that our users are helping us translate it into many more languages using the Google in Your Language console. Encouraging people to contribute their knowledge online is particularly important for languages with limited web content, and we are glad to see that knols have been written in 59 different languages to date. It has been very exciting to have people all over the world come forward to help improve online content in their language.

We have worked quickly to incorporate the features most requested by our early authors, such as usage stats showing reader activity on knols and rich media embedding (videos, spreadsheets, forms, slideshows, etc.). All of these improvements are tracked in our Announcement and Release Notes.

The rich media embedding should further improve the search engine optimization tendencies that apparently already come along with Knol. Search gurus Danny Sullivan and Aaron Wall both looked at the service’s effects on SEO shortly after its launch. Wall even found that Google was ranking his duplicate content on Knol higher than the original source.

Knol receives usage from 197 countries and territories on an average day according to the Google guys. Interestingly enough, I haven’t come across too many knols in results in my everyday searching.

To be fair, Google’s always been good about translating its products and services into different languages.  Also, what’s unpopular in one country may not encounter the same reaction in another (compare Orkut’s market shares in the U.S. and Brazil, if you want), and the move follows a bit of a pattern since Street View has covered both Italy and France in the past couple of weeks.

 

Another big factor in Knol’s favor is the wobbly world economy.  The site’s revenue-sharing scheme should become more and more attractive if people are being squeezed by job losses and inflation.

But there are problems with Knol.  Robin Wauters writes, "[T]he site is often criticized for featuring articles that are simply not complete or downright inaccurate."  It’s lacking a lot of articles, too, and even Googlers have been known to go straight to Wikipedia instead of adding new blurbs (see a recent mention of Gaudi).

We’ll see what happens, then.  Just don’t count on Knol gaining some sort of international rock star status.

We have already seen how Knol grabbed great Google rankings for a significant percentage of pages listed on Knol’s home page. Knol isn’t supposed to have a high PageRank yet, but Google may be giving its house resource a little algorithmic love behind the scenes.

Wall suggested this as he reached out to see how a page on the site might fare for him. He created an SEO Basics Knol that "was essentially a duplicate of my Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com)," he said.

Google cited the new Knol as being similar to work already on the web at Work.com and Business.com. Wall searched for a string of text from the article and found it ranking on Google; searching for it with duplicate content filters negated found the Knol piece ranking above its syndicated and much older placement on Business.com.

"Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm," said Wall.

"Google knows the content is duplicate, and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source."

Whether Google changes this behavior or not, which could happen given all the algorithm tweaking they regularly do, probably won’t change the flood of SEOs churning out pages at Knol. Considering Google’s treatment of such content with favorable rankings, SEOs may have to do this out of a need to compete.

And we’ve all seen how well competitors fare against Google. Ask.com seems moribund, and depends on Google advertising; Yahoo took an ad deal with Google to avoid being taken over by Microsoft; and even Microsoft sees Google as a major competitor.

By ranking Knol articles highly, Google, by design or accident, made Knol a go-to destination for anyone seeking traffic for a website. Knol became something SEOs must consider in their work for their sites and clients because of this, and that may not be a great thing.

At the same time, Google can’t be neutral ranking its own properties even if they don’t directly, manually mess with individual rankings – that’s because they hire the testers which evaluate their search result algorithms, and we have reason to believe these tests in turn can shape which directions Google’s algorithms take. It would be hard for any search company to not be trapped in this conflict. But in the future, what could be a more direct skewing with results would be when Google tries to format Knol results differently from the rest; like by adding eye-catching star icons near the snippet to show how well an article rates. Or just imagine a special “onebox” listing Knol articles amidst organic results; Google already does this with Google News content, for instance, but they don’t host all that content themselves (though they do host news from some agencies).

Additionally, Google is already somewhat messing with link juice by counting most of the incoming links to Knol articles, but completely disregarding the outgoing links (on the articles I checked, at least), thanks to the use of nofollow. (Not that they’re alone in that; Wikipedia does the same.)

Incidentally, before Knol’s release a common attack against Google was that Wikipedia articles rank way to high way too often. This was something I never found to be true, which is of course a matter of web site taste and preference. Often when I want to find a good introduction to a given topic I look at nothing but the Wikipedia article at first, and then go from there to perhaps find comparative sources. Entering search query wikipedia or similar yields Wikipedia often enough, and even entering just search query does, quite frequently. In a way, that might be because often a given Wikipedia article is the closest thing to a “mass consensus” kind of article you will find online today. We’ll see how Knol compares with this, because many or perhaps most of the Knol articles are anything but mass consensus… Knol is very much single-author-driven, and even if you pick the default publishing mode (which allows revisions from others, but each will be moderated before a potential go-live) the name of the original author will still appear visibly on top, in the URL.

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If Knol were a baseball player, it would be in contention for the Major League batting title going into the second half of the season.

Sullivan noted his findings on Search Engine Land, after taking a look at 30 different knols selected from the main Knol page. Of those thirty, ten made the top-ten search results for their keyword searches on Google.

“We’ve been assured that just because content sits on Google’s Knol site, it won’t gain any ranking authority from being part of the Knol domain,” Sullivan wrote.

Being a new site, Knol didn’t show any PageRank. But behind the scenes, as Sullivan suggested, PageRank calculations happen continually.

We decided to repeat his experiment; it’s easy enough to do, making it well-suited for our purposes. Here’s where we found Knol pages in the top-ten for their keywords, when they ranked that well:

A Crisis in Leadership: 4
Restless Leg Syndrome: 0
Ischemic Stroke: 0
Breastfeeding: 0
Chicago Hot Dogs: 0
Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM): 0
Lung Cancer: 6
Buttermilk Pancakes: 0
Music in Capoeira: 3
Pediatric Sports Injuries: 0

We batted 3 out of 10 in randomly picking topics off of the Knol home page, an average that would keep us in the batting order every day and have our agent salivating over free agent negotiations at baseball’s winter meetings.

Google’s Knol will get a lot of SEO attention, there’s no doubt about it. The opportunity to grab prime organic placement for a given keyword phrase, at minimal cost, will be irresistible.

When you log-in within your Google account to write an article on a subject you’re familiar with, you’ll use the kind of live-layout editor typical for Google (and much easier to use than Wikipedia’s editor). For every article you can also choose your licensing, your collaboration, and your advertising model. For instance, you can connect an article to your AdSense account – this triggers a verification process. You can pick a license; either a Creative Commons Attribution license, or a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license, or the old-style “all rights reserved.” And for collaboration, you can pick open (everyone who’s signed in can edit), moderated (everyone can suggest edits but you or another author will be able to approve these before they would go live – this is the default setting), and closed (meaning only owners – i.e. admins – and authors can edit).

Editing a page, and visualizing article revisions

Right now, a lot of the existing Knols – Google defines a knol as a “unit of knowledge”, and perhaps this will be how people name articles hosted on Knol too – deal with subjects of a more serious or scientific nature, like health. (Google’s help page says you can write “(Almost) anything you like,” adding that you pick the subject “and write it the way you see fit” as they don’t edit knols nor do they “try to enforce any particular viewpoint”… subject to the terms of service and their content policy, which disallows e.g. images containing nudity, and “spam,” a rather broad term in this case. You may also not write anything commercial if you’re in “Cuba, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Syria, or Sudan,” Google says.)

Other articles, like the frontpage-featured “How to Backpack”, are of a lighter nature, but still very long and detailed. (I’ve started a collaborative stub covering FriendFeed.) On that note, even the URL is quite long, and includes the owner’s name… a peculiar choice for collaborative pages, and a potential barrier if you consider going for the open collaboration model, as people may associate other people’s edits with yours.

Naturally, the current articles are just the site’s seeding – it remains to be seen in what direction it grows. The quality of wikis and other projects hoping for user participation often depend on a good community spirit, which in turn often reflects a company’s karma… and usually, that’s the sum of that company’s past actions.

Reading an article, there is a nice table of contents featured on top. The header section in general takes up quite a bit of space for Knol articles. Considering the focus of these articles is to get a point across, the font for the main content that follows is awkwardly small. On articles there are now a couple of review features for other users, even when you don’t have the permission to hit the Edit button on top: you may be able to comment; you can rate an article; you can flag it as inappropriate; and last not least, you can review it. When you start a review, the Knol editor as usual opens – slightly sluggish at this time, as are some other parts of the site (with its dynamic, on-page JavaScript reloads), though these may be launch effects – and you can add your opinions. Peer review is something known especially from the science community, which the Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know well too (peer review even allegedly inspired Larry Page to create the back-links counting PageRank algorithm which led to their “Backrub” engine, and later, Google search).

If we do want to compare this project to Wikipedia, then perhaps we can think of Knol, at least at this time, as slightly more top-down than the bottoms-up, everyone-can-edit Wikipedia.org. While more and more Wikipedia too is adding restrictions and special rights, their original spirit could perhaps be summed up with “by and large people want to do good, and many small, even hasty edits, add up to a by and large great quality.” And then perhaps Google Knol’s stance is more like, “someone’s responsible for an article, changes will be owner-approved by default, and people’s actions will be rated.” Using a biography page and a real name is suggested as well, and Google offers a verification method (you can verify via your mobile phone, or a credit card… at least the latter method was broken when I tried).

Let’s see how these two models compare against each other; there’s a lot to be won by allowing everyone to quickly do edits, but a more tightly controlled model may have benefits as well. And perhaps all those people complaining about Wikipedia – or who had Wikipedia articles they started be deleted, as Wikipedia does not allow all kinds of entries – will now consider Knol a potential new home for research and sharing. And there’s another big difference to Wikipedia: at Knol you’ll potentially get paid, through the AdSense ads. Which would mean that the more popular your article, among other factors, the higher your revenues. And Google gets a share of these revenues, naturally (even when Google Knol is listed as an entity separate from AdSense with a 0% share in the process)… though I’m not so sure exactly how they aim to pay collaborators on articles. Money can be an incentive but may also cause friction. It’ll be interesting to watch where this project goes; and even if you may prefer the Wikipedia style of collaborative publishing, it seems a little competition can’t hurt.

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