Forget the web, write Knols?

We reflected earlier this week on the potential conflict of interest Google's Knol throws up as it turns them into for-profit content aggregator as well as search company, amongst early evidence that it favours Knol results over others - now more grist to this mill today. Aaron Wall copied an article onto Knol that he had previously published, essentially a duplicate of his Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com).

The result was, a day later, the Knol version of this ranked highest in Google searches despite the other 2 articles being around a lot longer. To say this is unlikely unless Google favours its own content is putting it mildly. As he notes in a fairly restrained way:

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. Google knows the content is duplicate (as proven by the notification they put on their page), and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source.

You can see what's going to happen - reverse tragedy of the commons - because Knol will reward you via Adsense, its a clarion call for the fast buck crowd. We predict we are going to have open season on other people's stuff being stuck into Knol by new authors, who have proclaimed themselves experts in their field. As Mahalo's Jason Calacanis notes:

It seems that Google, the greatest web-business ever created, is not satisfied with owning over 70% of search--now they want to own the first couple of pages in their search results.

(By the way, Jason's advice - forget your own stuff, get into that Googletent)

Now if he can see this coming............ but is this the thing that will make people disbelieve the "Do No Evil" mantra, which has already been put under some pressure?

Seductive though Knol clearly is to Google, I think if it is biassed, Google risks reducing trust in its core search business, and that is a huge risk, as from that the bulk of the Ad revenue still flows.