discovery and google

Bill de hOra¹

[Knol](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html) is a case of not so much of changing the Google mission, but the battlefield. Google now realise it's easier to organise well marked up content and have figured out a way to deal with what is known as metacrap by centralising where content is manufactured.

Folk keep asking me why we bother building data discovery engines, and I keep saying that when Google has figured out how to automatically add semantic value to plain text we can stop bothering … (and yes, I do know about these folk and their ilk).

comments (2)

Sean Gillies (on Wednesday 19 December, 2007)

We haven’t seen yet how much catalog/repository type metadata Knol will use. I suspect there will be very little other than Dublin Core title, description, keywords, etc., and that the garden of knols will be analysed in the same way that the larger web is.

Bryan (on Wednesday 19 December, 2007)

Can’t argue with that … but I think Bill’s central point (and my standard reply) are still valid.