Welcome to the hive

Google has launched an ambitious new project through which people can create "knowledge centers" on a variety of topics, according to the Google Blog.

The project, dubbed Knol, was undertaken to help people share knowledge of a particular topic by writing an "authoritative" article on it. The articles will eventually be open to commenting and editing by others.

People will also be able to rate an article to highlight its accuracy and/or importance.

Knol will be taking on wiki-style "collective knowledge" brands like Wikipedia, which hosts many of the same features already. Wikipedia entries often appear on the first page of results when a given topic is queried through search engines.

These articles generally climb to the top of organic search results because of their information value. But according to Google, Knol entries are intended to serve as a "starting point" for searchers.

For that reason, the company suggested they may rank high in search results.

Google also says there will be "significant" revenue sharing to authors who choose to place AdSense ads on their articles.

Google will take a hands-off approach to the editing of articles, involving itself only in ranking pages for search.

Pages will be available to other search engines as well. Not that it matters; as of November, Google's search share surpassed 65 percent in the US.