Google's search finds a rival site

GOOGLE Inc, owner of the most popular Internet search engine, has started a Website that will compete with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where users contribute and edit entries.

The site is called Knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge, the California company said on its blog, Bloomberg News reported. Google invited a selected group of users to start testing the site last week.

Wikipedia was created in 2001 and grew to become the eighth most-visited US Website, according to data for October from ComScore Inc. In challenging Wikipedia, Google is taking on a site that claims 75,000 active contributors working on 9 million articles in more than 250 languages.

"Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," Udi Manber, a Google vice president, wrote on the blog. "A Knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read."

Wikipedia benefits from Google's search engine, which is designed to send users to the sites most relevant to their query. For example, a Google search for Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate from Illinois, provides a link to a Wikipedia page just below the link to his own Website.

Google's product may allow the company to keep more users on its own site, the second most-visited in the US, rather than sending them to Wikipedia and elsewhere. Google gets 99 percent of its more than US$10 billion in annual sales from online advertising, mostly by selling sponsored text links on its own pages and partner sites.

"We welcome the Google Knol initiative," Wikipedia, which is owned by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, said in an e-mailed statement. "The more good free content, the better for the world."

Google had 131.6 million US visitors in October, more than double Wikipedia's 56.1 million, the Virginia-based ComScore said. Yahoo! Inc had 136.8 million.

The Wikimedia Foundation, started in 2003, said this year that it is moving to San Francisco in January from St Petersburg, Florida.

Google shares fell US$4.09 to US$689.96 at 4pm on Friday New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.