Also humans are intelligent enough to pick through the garbage and the good articles, I am not worried about that. Additionally what you may think is garbage maybe be someone honing there writing skills and trying to learn to be a good researcher and article writing its not necessarily hacks and spammers with bad intentions.

Everyone knows that even if you read something you still have to fact check, do your own research and use common sense. If you don't know that by now you have lot more problems than reading knols.

Secondly there are a lot of reputable journalists and article writers who do no fact checking of there own. That is a known fact in the media. A lot media outlets have turned to SPECULATIVE, AND THEORY BASED articles and news reporting that are impossible to substantiate because there is no way of proving for example something has not happened yet. And getting stories from 2nd and 3rd hand without verifying facts through scientific research is always a problem. Which is what most media outlets are doing these days because they don't want to spend the money real investigative journalists. However these news agencies and media outlets are passed of as reputable providing quality information to the public.

So I think that there is a lot of problems that need to be addressed especially in the current media because people take them more seriously and they do more damage than knols at this point. And if something has been plagerised than it should be brought before the courts.

I’m not sure who quoted it but I understand the quote that “The Internet is a solution looking for a problem.” To a large extent the internet has been dominated (in terms of successful monitorization at least) by industries, products and schemers at the lower end of the food chain. However, I believe that the internet’s future purpose is to deliver a complete and comprehensive education to every person on the planet – anytime, anywhere, on topics relevant to their situation and at a pace suitable to them. Now whilst I admire the completely altruistic Wikipedia’s attempt to do this I think it is missing the contribution of people like myself that want to express thoughts and share learnings in my own hand and without the vigorous editing of others whose opinions that I may or may not respect. Also, I think you may be writing off the Knol project a little early in the way that Mark Twain explained “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”

As for your noble cause in the fight against plagiarism, I think that Leonardo da Vinci had a rather sanguine view on this unwelcomed disease “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else”

I hope you're right but fear that you likely aren't…

I suppose it is possible, but if that is the case Google has made some additional mistakes along the way.

Thank you for your thoughts! It's definitely something to think about.

This dovetails back into your point about Google lacking any sort of community for Knol. Perhaps this is just some sort of weird case study to see how spam operators operate. Or maybe it's just another way to make money through AdSense. Honestly, I have no idea what else it could be for. It's useless right now, and I don't see it surviving. It might develop some useful content, but I'll bet as soon as it does, they will be plagiarized on another knol page or a blogspot blog.

I don't know how you make the web more searchable either, but I'm not in the search engine business. At the very least, Google needs to find a way of identifying original content accurately and providing it with proper credit. Even when a link back to the original source is included, Google has problems. Google is a mess, and it's getting worse, despite what they post on their blog.

I seriously wonder what's in their coffee cup when they make statements like that. They clearly are touchy about the issue, but if they spent time trying to solve the problem rather than defending the status quo, maybe we could all get some sleep and the spammers and scrapers would have to look for other ways to get by rather than stealing from innocent bystanders.

However, I do agree that perhaps it is early to call it a total failure, but the hype and the attention was largely Google's own doing so I don't feel too bad if I am being a bit unfair.

I also agree about the fallibility of Google's algorithm. As you pointed out, Knol has illustrated this problem to a “T” and it serves as a great microcosm for how Google has treated the rest of the Web. This problem is amplified for Google in this case because, by keeping Knol so close to their vest, they now face challenges of bias on top of ignorance. Whether such allegations carry weight, I'm not convinced that they do, it cuts deeper.

It's interesting how search engines have evolved. Early engines counted keywords, that worked for a while until keyword stuffing became common. Then Google pioneered links as currency and that has worked for a while, but now we have comment spam, spam blogs and all kinds of other garbage linking. That is largely meaningless too. Any “gold standard” will fall once the spammers learn how to game it.

It is going to be interesting to see if an how Google adapts to this. You're right they are in a fight they can't win with the splog networks, directories and paid links, but what's next? How can Google, or anyone for that matter, make the Web searchable?

I don't have an answer to that question…