Google Knol Completes 100,000 Pages

It’s hard to believe that Google Knol’s 6th month anniversary is fast approaching. The Wikipedia direct competitor, which launched to the public back in July of 2008, is reporting that Knol users have collectively produced 100,000+ knols. That’s no small feat for a site that most of us wrote off almost immediately.

Google Knol vs Wikipedia

Knol’s size still pales in comparison to Wikipedia’s amassed 2,702,519 content pages. It’s probably an unfair comparison, however, given the leader in the user-created content has been building up their base since 2001. As the chart below shows, it took Wikipedia almost two years to reach a similar number of pages.


Of course, 2001 - 2005 was also a much less trafficked time for the web, with less users on the web, let alone creating content. But since 2005, Wikipedia has grown steadily at about 500,000 articles per year, a rate that Google might be able to match if they were to push knol results prominently in search results (although traffic would indicate otherwise).


Google Knol is available in eight languages and visited by people in 197 countries. The Squidoo-like site also offers aggregate pageview stats for each author, activity metrics for each knol, sharing functionality, ratings, the ability to create knols from templates, and Google gadget embedding. It’s an impressive feature-set that will probably result in 100,000 more knols created before they reach their one year anniversary, but it’s certainly not stealing the wind from Wikipedia’s sails. Yet.