Knol Could Knock Wikipedia Down a Notch

This week Google unveiled Knol, a Wikipedia rival, after six months in beta.
Knol is a publicly-authored knowledge site. To protect against page vandalism without stifling community input, new pages are placed under "moderated collaboration," meaning anyone can add to them but contributions only go live after the original author(s) review them.
Google's decision to curate a Wikipedia rival raises conflict of interest issues. Currently, Wikipedia entries for a myriad of topics appear in top positions in organic search listings because the pages are information-heavy and well-tended by editors and contributors.

Google, which hosted 61.5 percent of searches in June, could easily topple Wikipedia's dominance by giving Knol pages a calculated advantage. (The company has never fully revealed its criteria for gaging a website's quality, and the algorithm is often changed.)

When Project Knol was first announced in December 2007, Google suggested Knol entries would probably top organic search results over time because of their information value, posing a supposedly fair threat to its rival.

To test this claim, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land examined the search positions of Knol sites after just one day live.

"1/3 of the pages listed on the Knol home page that I tested ranked in the top [10] results," Sullivan wrote. "I came away feeling that being on Knol does indeed give pages an advantage they might not get if they'd been hosted on some other brand new web site." He clarified by adding that while Knol does not obviously guarantee a top position in search, a good 33 percent of additions get ranked within a day.

Sullivan was not alone in testing Knol's search buoyancy. The Thinkseer blog observed that a Knol article titled "How to Backpack" already appears within top five rankings in Google's organic search.

Knol currently has no visible PageRank — a visual Google score of a page's importance. But Sullivan diplomatically points out that while PageRank results aren't immediately visible to outsiders, Google is "constantly calculating PageRank values" behind the scenes.