Up until now, I had no opinion whatsoever about Knol and God knows I am not a fan of Wikipedia.    But in the past couple of days I have read enough reports to convince me that Google is pulling a fast one on people - and they’re not even bothering to hide it.

Google said right back at the beginning that they wouldn’t get into the content business.   That they were a search company, not a content company.   OK, they went back on that statement but I don’t care.   They can change their minds if they want to.    But I have always liked Google for their ethical way of doing things, for taking the moral high ground of doing business, for doing things the “anti-Microsoft” way.    Where Microsoft would force you to use their products, Google would say “hey, you don’t have to use our products, take them or leave them”.    I really liked that and mainly for that reason, I used all of Google’s offerings for the simple reason that they weren’t forced upon me.

But now Knol is being forced upon me and I don’t like it.   Google has basically turned into another Microsoft and this is very disillusioning.

Knol is being forced upon me because Google is already giving Knol webpages favourable search rankings.    Search Engine Land took 30 different knols and searched in Google to see if those knols appeared in the top 30 results for the words they’re titled for.  10 of the 30 were on the first page of results.

Now answer me honestly, would you get that kind of good quick ranking if you were writing your own blog on say Wordpress?    I don’t think so.    This, in my eyes, makes Google search results uncredible and biased because Google is pointing you first and foremost to their own material and not to outside material such as Wikipedia or blogs.    Regardless of whether the Knol pages are good or bad, you are being sent to Knol first.

This is precisely why Google should never have started Knol in the first place.   You can’t do content AND search at the same time because it’s a blatant conflict of interest.   How can you do both content and search and not be accused of favouring your content over your rivals?   Everytime I search for something now, I will have to scroll past all the Knoll pages to find all the other stuff.

Or I will have to consider switching to Yahoo.

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