Google has put up a screenshot of Knol, their new product that everyone is touting as a rival to Wikipedia. It will be pretty, much prettier than Wikipedia. But I'm not sure that will be enough. If they don't find a way to make it more collaborative, this project go the way of Nupedia.

Slashdot reports that Google is developing a tool called "Knoll" that will provide some of the same functionality as Wikipedia - with some important differences. From the Google Blog:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

This sounds like an interesting answer to Larry Sanger's Citizendium project. The fact that it's Google-backed is not good news for Sanger.

Wikipedia Creator Jimmy Wales is taking on Google. His "Wikia" search is an attempt to harness the collaborative approach of Wikipedia for a Web search. Wikia will open up its algorithm (a la Wikipedia, open source, free software, etc.):

Wales said he also loves the court system because people can go in and watch the proceedings. He wants to deliver the same transparency to search. Contributors will publish, test, research, and modify the algorithms.

Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, notes the problems that could arise from this type of search: