August 18, 2008

Knol's Advanced Search

Knol has recently added a search toolkit that lets you build advanced queries, a feature that wasn't available at launch. Many of the options from Google web search can be used in Knol: phrase search, negative terms, OR search. You can also restrict the search to titles, summaries, authors, reviews, recent knols. Google offers three options for ordering the results: by relevance, by creation date, by last modified date and an interesting "reverse sort".


The advanced search option should be a good way to discover knols related to a topic, but it fails to properly rank the knols. In a search for [Google Reader], the top result is a page copied from Google Reader's help center that has a higher rating than the second result, which is more relevant. If you don't use the advanced search, Knol shows less but better results.

A search for [the] returns 29315 results (507 edited in the past 24 hours), which should be close to the total number of knols, but many of them include content that already exists on the web, aren't very detailed or well-formatted. You can still find some good knols, but the signal-to-noise ration seems to be low. The knols that receive some attention are those that are featured on the homepage, but Google only features 5 hand-picked knols daily.
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5 comments:

  1. AnonymousAugust 18, 2008 at 1:34 PM

    Is there a "no shameless self-promotion knols" checkbox? Because that's 90% of what I seem to get from Knol.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alex ChituAugust 18, 2008 at 1:45 PM

    @Jemaleddin:
    How would you detect algorithmically "shameless self-promotion"?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alex ChituAugust 19, 2008 at 1:07 AM

    Why use Knol? Because you know a lot of things about a topic (e.g.: new media marketing strategies) and you don't have a place to share them. A blog is not the proper place to write long articles and you don't have time to write a book.

    ReplyDelete
  4. raoAugust 24, 2008 at 9:03 AM

    I posted number of articles on Knol on management. I plan to post more. Compared to blogs (I have many), knol will be better platform for knowledge articles.I liked the medical articles. They are very good. More and more good articles will follow. More and more authors are initiating their articles on knol. Serious authors who will keep their articles up to date and very informative will emerge on knol.

    narayana-rao-kvss

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousSeptember 5, 2008 at 8:38 AM

    hmm, just used knol.... it basically sucks 66% of the time...

    Surfing the knol homepage:
    read a Bill Gates article seems to be a nonsensical translation from chinese.

    read an article about the Netherlands which was copy pasted from wikipedia (wtf?).

    read an article about knol vs wikipedia, that was interesting, someone who put effort into it...

    ReplyDelete

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