Most of us consider Wikipedia to be the ultimate online knowledge base or encyclopedia. I always use Wikipedia for Celebrity information, games and other technical stuff that I don’t know. The next best thing after Wikipedia is obviously Google. But, with Google about to launch it’s own online encyclopedia the scenario is about to change.

The search engine company Google is going to design an encyclopedic dictionary for internet users. According to Google, this will compete directly with Wikipedia. This ‘dictionary’ has been christened as Knol. I guess that’s probably a short for Knowledge.

The Google version of online encyclopedia is going to be an organization of ‘user generated information’ covering all the fields of knowledge.Although, the Google knowledge platform is somewhat similar to Wikipedia there are some subtle differences.

For example Wikipedia is a collaborative system of authors. There are no ‘authors’ listed on the Wiki pages because there can be multiple authors for one page. Google’s knol will be authored. This is not the first time Google is coming up with such a platform.

The Google base is a similar knowledge base to that of Wikipedia. So if you are thinking that Google is launching knol just for advertising money you are wrong. Also, I would compare knol to blogger(another Google product). However, there is no information regarding the release of Knol. I think it’s kind of cool that Google is coming up with a Wiki like encyclopedia.

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