Google's greasy Knol - the slippery slope to biased search?

Google released its pay-for-performance version of Wikipedia, called "Knol", yesterday. (A Knol is Google's term for a unit of knowledge apparently. How many tweets are there in a Knol, anyone?).

I was at the "Wealth of Networks" event and chatted to a few people - digital economists of various stripes - about the game theory of its business model, - ie:

- it pays people if they write articles and those get click through
- it allows multiple competing articles on any subject
- the author can retain control over the content

Google of course believes this will increase content quality, but I must record that many of the people I spoke to yesterday had some misgivings - a very plausible alternative scenario is that when people write for money, not love then:

- people will write about topics that are highly trafficked regardless of cultural value
- they will write content that aims to drive traffic - ie it will be sensationalist, not factual
- because anyone can put up a soapbox, it will be far harder to discern fact from fiction, opinion from reality.
- voting and other feedback will be largely irrelevant as people vote for what they like, not what is correct or valuable

In other words its possibly more a declaration of open season for creationism and related "fact based" cr*p, political slag, slebnews and hyped-to-the nines reporting. Its a sort of reverse tragedy of the commons - because content production is subsidised, there will be overproduction of content and adverse selection based on what makes money rather than what is valuable.

Now it was ever thus in for-profit Media ecosystems, but has been somewhat rarer in the Encyclopedia world to date...... in fact, some analysts yesterday likened Knol more to pay-per-blog services oor businesses like Squidoo than Wikipedia per se.

More worrying still is this research out today from Danny Sullivan that implies that Google will give Knol topics high ranking status, compared to (say) Wikipedia ones:

I found 1/3 of the pages listed on the Knol home page that I tested ranked in the top results. I came away feeling that being on Knol does indeed give pages an advantage they might not get if they'd been hosted on some other brand new web site.

I was surprised to see a post covering how Knol's How to Backpack was already hitting the number three spot on Google. Really? I mean, how many links could this page have gotten already? As it turns out, quite a few. And more important, it's featured on the Knol home page, which itself is probably one of the most important links.

As Danny notes, its very difficult to believe that a Knol article, after 24 hours in the wild garners more links than say, oh, a Wikipedia article. unless it was assisted in some form.

Google giving its own for-profit service a leg up vs large-trafficked competitors - surely not

Actually, thats a very serious point - if there was just the slightest suspicion that Google's search was anything except neutral, I suspect that strategically they would create a major own goal - Ad revenue comes from trusted search - no trusted search, no searchers - no searchers, no Ad revenue.

These are early days, and hopefully these are teething problems, but I must flag a concern - Google is full of very bright people, and they could quite easily have calculated and mitigated these issues if they had wanted to.