Google Knol is Live

So Google has officially opened up Knol to the public. FYI, Knol is G’s next attempt to take over the world (or at least its information) by building a community-driven, open-source encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia.

Google gives us all the goods on its Googleblog, so I’ll let you do the reading yourself. Do note, though, that they are encouraging people to use their real names on this. Google argues that the authority we find in Knol will be vested in the authors and the author communities. Whereas Bearcat258, Hellfire23f, or some other alias was once our authority for everything we needed to know from Wikipedia’s entry on X, the end-user will now hopefully be able to cross-reference the names of Knol’s authors against other pieces of information (ostenbsibly on Knol profile pages or by way of a google-search) to determine the article’s own veracity and quality.

Fair enough. Google is correct in this regard. Information and authority is all relative anyway. Both are fairly dependent on identity. We generally differentiate between truth and rumour when we can (1) verify the content of the statement, and (2) find the source of the knowledge. I still find Google and Knol’s demands for open identity troubling, though. I think the likes of Facebook and Google has destroyed anonymity on the internet, and I’m not always certain if that’s a good thing. Google really does have the goods on us, and I wonder if I want this mega-corp being able to draw a character sketch of my person. I’m still unsure what the implications would be if I were to merge my internet and IRL personas into one name/user.

Knol will be a success, truly, but I wonder what the wider implications of such ‘non-anonymous’ projects are..

Anyway.

Just Enjoy Googles next inovation

Cuil --- New Generation Search

I knew we will have somebody soon trying to compete with the mighty Google in the web search market and here they are - CUIL - meaning Knowledge . They opened their service today with some claims “Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.” . This means they have more pages indexed in the server to look into. I think the number of pages indexes doesn’t matter but it really matters how intelligently you use an algorithm to bring out the best results out of the pages you have indexed.
Some insights on what I felt when I tried some fast tests on the new search engine. I was not at all impressed by the results I got for some typical keywords that anybody can look on the internet. I searched for ‘order food online’ , the keywords that someone search for finding take away food in their country .The first four results were fine and a bit related, but not the best ones in the market right now. I was also given some blog posts which had the keywords in their content. And that was never expected too.
Other changes that can be seen are the three column page layout when the results are shown . I really don’t think the we are unhappy with the current simple and straight layout from Google .Also I didn’t find the page to include some thing new or innovative in their idea .Google have always tried to make things simple and they were successful in fulfilling the users requirements.
I really think if any company wants to compete with Google their first and last improvement must be in Search quality. As a frequent reader of Google research blog, I am pretty sure that they are well ahead in future ideas and are going to come with something new for the semantic web or the future Web 3.0.
It didn’t look good to me when a start up come in public hinting at competing with the big players before proving their quality in search. I feel ‘Cuil’ needs to improve a lot in their search quality and need to compete with the smaller players before aiming to the top.