Google unleashes Wikipedia rival

Google's latest service, Knol, has just launched, intended as a repository of knowledge for everything from literature to DIY.In the words of its creator, it's meant to be "the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read".We predicted at the start of the year that Knol would kill off Wikipedia, mainly by choking off its hold on the top spot for search results. The motivation? Advertising revenue: Knol pages can carry Google ads and even give a cut of the profits to authors. And authors are central to Knol - a mugshot and bio takes pride of place on every Knol's page.But Knol as it stands today needs some improvements.For example, this piece on diabetes, written by a professor from the University of Southern California, is well-written and comprehensive. But it's one massive block of text, broken up by pictures that add little to the content, and lacks links, references or a digestible summary. It's all or nothing.You can make edits, as on Wikipedia. But they will be queued for the author's approval. Knols can be set to allow anyone to edit, although most I've looked at are completely closed, or are moderated first.Knol does provide some loose guidelines to writers but they are less strict than Wikipedia's.Google's track record suggests Knol will grow fast. The number of articles will certainly increase, but it will take longer for it to become a mature information source in the way Wikipedia has. Question is, how long does Wikipedia have left?

Search Engine Battle - Ex-Google employees launch a search engine CUIL

A new search engine launched yesterday. Cuil (that's "cool", phonetically) is today's buzz word on the web, primarily because the Cuil's founders - Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, Louis Monier and Russell Power - are respected search experts. Patterson, Monier and Power are former Google employees, and comparisons with the 300lb gorilla of internet search abound.Michael Arrington at TechCrunch compares sizes. At launch, Cuil boasted an index of 120 billion webpages. Cuil claims this makes it larger than Google, although Google begs to differ."Even if Cuil is bigger than Google, it doesn't mean Cuil is more relevant," points out Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land. "Nor does it mean adding more documents in a "I'm bigger than you" game would improve the state of search overall."Indexing is only part of the problem, says Om Malik at Gigaom. "Analysing and displaying all the information is extremely resource-intensive." Cuil claims to rank pages by content rather than the popularity rank. But this isn't a black and white issue, says Sullivan.Google relies on more than just popularity to rank pages, and preliminary results suggest Cuil actually does use popularity to rank some sites - else a search for Harry Potter wouldn't bring up the official movie site at the top of the list.That leaves a rather nice 'magazine style' results layout as one of Cuil's USPs - something that's likely to be loved or hated depending on the user.But Cuil's real selling point might prove to be the privacy issue. It claims not to log IP information - something that Google, Yahoo and Teoma (the engine behind Ask) all do."That may be reassuring to some searchers, but to date, even scare stories about what Google could do (not that it does) hasn't kept searchers away from it," says Sullivan.Cuil is no more than 24 hours old - Google has been with us for a decade. Clearly, it's too early to say whether the king of search is about to be usurped.