http://knol.google.com/k#
Knol is a Google project where in you can find artciles on range of topics written by users. It was opened to beta for public on July 23,2008.
Knol is the brain child of Udi Manber, who is also the author of agrep and glimpse. He is currently employed as VP, Engineering at Google. He previously served as Chief Algorithm Officer at Amazon and was the CEO of A9 , a subsidiary of Amazon which specializes in Search Technologies.
Here is how Udi describes Knol as "pages that are meant to be the first things someone who searches for the first time will want to read". Google defines Knol as "unit of knowledge".
Many see Knol as a competitor for Wikipedia ! But personally I felt that Knol is no where close to wikipedia and not many people are aware of existence of Knol. Knol has already attracted criticism from various corner , with some people describing it as "wasteland" of article copied from other sources, entries which are outdated and seld promotional.
Knol articles are licensed by default under Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0 license ( which allows any one to use to material by mentioning the name of the author. But authors can choose CC-BY-NC-3.0 license prohibiting commercial reuse.
Knols employs "nofollow" outgoing links, to prevent links in its article from influencing search engine rankings.
Lets wait and watch whether Knol would ever be considered as an alternative to wikipedia.
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