Comments on: A Google Knol on Disruptive Technology

By: Jeffrey Carr

Jeffrey Carr — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:04:51 +0000

I just left a comment at Matt's blog regarding his take on this, and in it I mentioned my concern that Google may tilt search results in favor of Knol listings over other Web pages. Your blog, for example, might fall below your Knol page in a query on Disruptive Technologies. Once I submitted my comment, I checked to see if anyone has noticed such a skewing in their Google search results and --- what a surprise --- Google DOES seem to be doing precisely that. It was discovered by no less an authority than Danny Sullivan. You can read his findings here: http://searchengineland.com/080724-140223.php Dare Obasanjo follows up with other evidence here: http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/28/Goog... Not good, IMO.

By: Bob Gourley

Bob Gourley — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:47:41 +0000

Matt,
Thanks much for both those comments. I have to agree with you regarding those concerns. I still want to keep an open mind here, but did you read Nicolas Carr's Atlantic article on "Is Google Making us Stoopid?" I think he would appreciate reading your post and think we need to get it to his attention somehow.
Here is a quote from his article:
"For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired's Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
Bob

By: Matt Devost

Matt Devost — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:00:18 +0000

There are a few concerns I have.
1) Anyone can create a knol on any topic so we could end up with 30 knols on disruptive technologies. If so, how is this different from just posting a page on Geocities.
2) Google getting into the content business makes me a little uncomfortable. While they claim a knol won't get special page rankings, in two days of operation, we see knol pages on the first page of search results already displacing sites that have spent years building up their specialized content on a topic. Jason Calacanis has been posting interesting research surrounding this issue.
I went in and posted placeholder knols for "terrorism" and "homeland security" so feel free to edit them.

By: Matt Devost

Matt Devost — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:20:23 +0000

I updated my thoughts with a blog entry: http://blog.devost.net/2008/07/25/does-knol-provi...