Just to underscore the impetus behind the launch of Googlepedia – er, Knol – I went back to rerun a test I first ran over a year ago to see how high Wikipedia pages rank in a random set of Google searches. Here were the results on August 10, 2006:
World War II: #1
Israel: #1
George Washington: #4
Genome: #9
Agriculture: #6
Herman Melville: #3
Internet: #5
Magna Carta: #2
Evolution: #3
Epilepsy: #6
And here are the results today:
World War II: #1
Israel: #1
George Washington: #2
Genome: #1
Agriculture: #1
Herman Melville: #1
Internet: #1
Magna Carta: #1
Evolution: #1
Epilepsy: #3
This kind of looks like a trend, no?
I’m guessing that serving as the front door for a vast ad-less info-moshpit outfitted with open source search tools is not exactly the future that Google has in mind for itself. Enter Knol.
Nick- Recalling your distaste at the sound of the word “blog,” I must say that “knol” is far worse. I suspect it is klingon for “spam.”
Quick comment on the Tom / Nick discussion:
Wikipedia dominates Google search results on searches for words and names, and therefore gets more than 2% (and growing) of the total traffic coming from Google, more than any other single site. However the most monetizable queries are generally longer and more targeted. So Wikipedia may be #1 on World War 2, but on Las Vegas they drop to #9 (still not bad at all) and on Las Vegas hotels their top hit is #193. Wikipedia is Google’s #1 destination, and it dominates one type of search (which happens to include the most popular queries). But to call Google a front-door to Wikipedia is to ignore the 98% of generally more monetizable traffic that’s going elsewhere.
Gil,
Thanks for data and perspective. Sounds right.
Nick