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Google announced a launch of new service, Knol.

What is Knol?

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

Authors have full control over their work. There are 3 levels of intellectual property licenses to chose from:

• Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
• Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License
• All Rights Reserved.

You may associate your AdSense account with Knol and earn additional money that way.

Authors may collaborate, users may post comments, suggestions, give ratings and author(s) may decide whether t include the suggestions or not publish them.

Google’s Knol is attempt to compete with other websites such as Wikipedia or Scholarpedia, but…

…Wikipedia welcomed the Google Knol initiative saying that “The more good free content, the better for the world.”

While Wikipedia articles are written collectively under a “neutral point of view” policy, Knol will highlight personal expertise by emphasizing authorship and, like articles provided on Squidoo and Helium.com, knols will contain the personal opinions of the author - from Wikipedia.

So is it really an attempt to compete with Wikipedia?

Im not so sure about it. Knol has great potential as its part of Google family. But my guess is that it’s mostly pointed at gathering authority documents, make them easily searchable on Google which will lead to showing more relevant adds through Google ad network.

According to Danny Sullivan, “Google’s goal of making Knol pages easy to find on search engines could conflict with its need to remain unbiased.”

If Knol documents gain high search engine ranking it will become much more difficult to rank well for many key phrases as Wikipedia is already occupying many competitive keywords on #1 spot on Google and other search engines. Knol success would mean that #2 will be also taken.

[Update] I was still wandering why would Google spend time and money on developing second Wikipedia and i came up with this simple answer: because they CAN. Google can do it, so why wouldn’t they do it.

Google have always been trying to enter new markets. And so far they succeeded. And now they enter Wiki-style market. Not only they associated AdSense accounts for ad serving (making money by serving ads is their primary income), but they also gained another great channel of gathering informations about user’sand their behavior (by doing that Google may serve more relevant ads and make search results more accurate).