Google's "Don't be Evil" mantra - Holy shit

Last night Google announced that they are starting a new project named Knol. Hmm interesting I must say. Actually, it pertains to creating wiki like pages. Now people will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on and so forth. One of two things comes to my mind when I read about this new development. Firstly, will Wikipedia and Wikia become yesterday and secondly if it becomes due to certain reasons which I will elaborate later, then are we going to get crappy results (spoke about it in earlier post) which we most often get when we try finding something in Google.

Considering that, Wikipedia is turning out to be one of Google's biggest rivals in terms of search results. So there is all the more possibilities that Google is trying hard to kill both Wikipedia and Wikia (Jimmy Wales social search engine).

So the interesting detail among all these is the timing of this announcement which comes just days before Wikia's beta launch. So what's the future of Wikipedia and Wikia? It all rests in our hands. Though Google is in a win-win situation because of the following reasons:

• Still we use Google as primary search engine and with its allied services, we will be driven towards making those knols which can anyway outrun Wikipedia in terms of the fresh content which we found in Wiki.
• Remember Google's indexing mechanism which can now index Knols to a larger extent (since it's Google's own system)and keep the major traffic away from Wiki.
• The moolah factor which is on the side of Google will definitely help it to close the deal better than wikipedia which is trying to raise some money.
• The corporations just love Google because of its far-flung reach through its ads program and other different tie-ups. So when the corporations love Google and in a way hate Wikipedia on its openness program, so biting the larger chunk of the cake won't be that difficult for Google, I suppose.
• Last but not least, the power of the masses is in favor of Google as of now due to its reach.
  

So my take on this will be conservative, as in, it will take some time for people to get used to Knols and creating, editing & publishing fresh content. But my gut feeling says that the war is far from getting over between Google & Wikipedia. And at the end of it all, we the users will be most benefited as I suppose some changes are due in Wiki's front and I personally want to see what Google comes up with next.