Dare Obasanjo quotes Nick Carr as a lead in to a post on Google’s Assault on Wikipedia:
Clearly Nick Carr wasn’t the only one that realized that Google was slowly turning into a Wikipedia redirector. Google wants to be the #1 source for information or at least be serving ads on the #1 sites on the Internet in specific area. Wikipedia was slowly eroding the company’s effectivenes at achieving both goals. So it is unsurprising that Google has launched Knol and is trying to entice authors away from Wikipedia by offering them a chance to get paid.
What is surprising is that Google is tipping it’s search results to favor Knol. Or at least that is the conclusion of several search engine optimization (SEO) experts and also jibes with my experiences.
After looking at some test cases he concludes:
Google is clearly favoring Knol content over content from older, more highly linked sites on the Web. I won’t bother with the question of whether Google is doing this on purpose or whether this is some innocent mistake. The important question is “What are they going to do about it now that we’ve found out?”
It’s early days for Knol so maybe the placement of Google search results will settle down over time.
Via other links I found confirmation that ‘[f]or years, Google’s link: command (and see here) has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website.’ Old news but I missed it at the time, but since I’d always wondered why the link: thing never seemed to work properly I thought it was worth mentioning.