http://www.kylewilliams.com/2009/does-google-knol-break-their-own-webmaster-guidelines/

There are plenty of rivals out there ready to move in as soon as the big G slips up (no, not you http://www.cuil.com).

maybe…but that’s what the cinema production companies thought when they too had control over production, distribution, and exhibition to the public. Until the authorities step in. I mean the media is monitored (although there are major flaws in the system eg Murdoch who technically is a foreigner but owns most of Australian media) to stop monopolies and conflicts of interest like this. Because the internet is a fairly new media outlet, there has yet been any real overview of the media ownership laws since its introduction (of course, it is extremely problematic being a global service too as compared to local media). But something will happen. I think google’s position as being a search provider, i.e a distributor and a publisher, ie, providing content, does not necessarily mean that it is being anti-competitive, but it does mean that it has a lot of power to act so…and therefore should be scrutinised very very closely. Good one Darren for pointing this out to us. Be very interesting to see what happens in the future..

jess

Google may be seen to have to much power now
only time will tell us

Jacob, I’m assuming that you’re talking about this story:
http://www.conversionrater.com/2007/02/23/google-selling-pr7-links-for-10000/ . If you’ll notice, I commented on that story within a day. This was an enterprise partner program, not any sort of link selling scheme. But just to be completely safe, we made it so that page didn’t flow PageRank.

“I just checked, and it’s now #1, with a page rank of zero. Lovely, nice level playing field.”

Jill, we only export PageRanks to the Google Toolbar every 3-4 months. In fact, that article has a ton of backlinks and quite a bit of PageRank.

What search term is ranking #1? Just curious as I would like to check and see how it ranks on my end.

Hmm…

Lara Says: PageRank and Search Engine Results Pages rankings (listings) have nothing to do with each other, guys… The sooner you start realizing that, the better off you’ll be. The fact that Google has a PageRank of 10, does not mean anything in this situation.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this doesn’t railroad the blogosphere onto Google’s track.

If people are going to be leaving Adsense, this is the perfect time for Microsoft or Yahoo to really open their programs and try to make them big. The way I see it is this…If a lot of big bloggers get angry with Adsense, the other two will start to make more money and that’ll just make them stronger. The trick to building a strong PPC program is having strong publishers. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

The problem with Google becoming a media company is that they are also still the #1 search engine, which is an inherent conflict of interest. I’ve started as a paid writer on another site, Brighthub.com, and I get revenue-sharing — I am paid the majority of the advertising dollars generated by my articles. Now my articles have to compete with knols, and it steams me a bit because of Google’s conflict of interest. In fact, it seems just a bit like “being evil”…

First, of course, Knol articles will rank highly. It’s an optimized, content-rich article on a site developed by the very best in the industry, Google themselves. I doubt very much that Google is giving the site any special weight. Instead, I would suspect a couple of things happened: 1) a lot of people took note of Google’s new product launch and linked to it, and 2) Google probably accidentally linked to it from some Google property where page-rank transferred over (maybe the Google Blog itself.) As a result, it saw a huge jump in search rank As people complained, Google responded, investigated the situation, and removed any offending links … just to be completely fair.

Second, it strikes me as completely antithetical of bloggers to be afraid of new media. The internet is going to keep changing, while most of that change recently has been driven by bloggers, it certainly isn’t fair to complain when others (even big players) try to get the wheels rolling.

Finally, it’s silly to call Google a media company, at this point. Sure, they are making ventures into media, but the vast majority of their revenue still comes from search advertising. Microsoft makes keyboards, but no one’s out there shouting, “Microsoft’s a peripheral company.”

I say, take a deep breath and relax. I, personally, wasn’t that impressed with Knol. It struck me as difficult to browse, heavily slanted towards medical articles, and a horrible name to boot. Besides, it looks little different than the old Google Answers, and we see how well that did.