Jason Calcanis is stirring things up nicely by pointing out that Google is ranking content on Knol - Google's new wikipedia-beater - extremely highly after only a few days of operation.
His screen grab on Flickr shows Knol coming in just behind Wikipedia for searches on "music in Capoeira". Matt Cutts commented on Twitter that the results need time to bed down - but funnily enough repeating the search in the UK this morning shows Wikipedia edged down to fifth, behind both Knol and Youtube! (screen grab below)
Jason no doubt hunted long and hard for a search that shows Wikipedia being 'unfairly treated', but he does raise some serious questions - as Google moves into content creation and management, can they be trusted not to give their own properties an undue advantage.
The sun is shining and I'm on holiday next week, so I'm going to err on the side of hopeless optimism and say that they will. The integrity of the algorithm is just too important to be sacrificed simply to support another potential outlet for Google Adwords - once we stop trusting Google's search results, the golden goose really is dead.
His screen grab on Flickr shows Knol coming in just behind Wikipedia for searches on "music in Capoeira". Matt Cutts commented on Twitter that the results need time to bed down - but funnily enough repeating the search in the UK this morning shows Wikipedia edged down to fifth, behind both Knol and Youtube! (screen grab below)
Jason no doubt hunted long and hard for a search that shows Wikipedia being 'unfairly treated', but he does raise some serious questions - as Google moves into content creation and management, can they be trusted not to give their own properties an undue advantage.
The sun is shining and I'm on holiday next week, so I'm going to err on the side of hopeless optimism and say that they will. The integrity of the algorithm is just too important to be sacrificed simply to support another potential outlet for Google Adwords - once we stop trusting Google's search results, the golden goose really is dead.
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