Knol

Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author. Authors could also choose to include ads from Google's AdSense on their pages. This profit-sharing was criticized as incentivizing self-promotion or spam. All contributors to the Knol project had to sign in with a Google account and were supposed to state their real names. Knol employed "nofollow" outgoing links, using an HTML directive to prevent links in its articles from influencing search-engine rankings. ==Reception==

Competition Knol was described both as a rival and as a complement to Wikipedia, offering a different format that addressed many of Wikipedia's shortcomings. BBC News reported that "Many experts saw the initiative as an attack on the widely used Wikipedia communal encyclopaedia." The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which owned the name Wikipedia and the servers hosting the Wikipedia projects, welcomed the Google Knol initiative, saying that "The more good free content, the better for the world." While Wikipedia articles were written collectively under a "neutral point of view" policy, Knol aimed to highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship. Dupont responded that the use was simply a coincidence as it is a commonly used font. Conflict of interest After Google's announcement of the project in December 2007, there was speculation on its motives and its position as a producer of content rather than as an organizer. The Guardians Jack Schofield argued that "Knol represents an attack on the media industry in general." There was debate whether Google search results could remain neutral because of possible conflict of interest. According to Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, "Google's goal of making Knol pages easy to find on search engines could conflict with its need to remain unbiased." As a response to such concerns, it was said ==Closure==

The media attention that Google Knol received at its launch soon dissipated. compared to Wikipedia, whose views accumulated into the billions. As a result, the financial model behind Knol was never realized. As a TechCrunch writer said when the notice was made, this "comes as something of a surprise to me – because I figured Google had already shut it down." ==See also==