According to a blog posting by Udi Manber, Google engineering vice president, the search engine is currently developing its own online encyclopaedia with the aim of "encouraging people who know about a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it."

Google has named the encyclopaedia, the "Knol project," with a Knol meaning a "unit of knowledge". The online publishing platform will allow people to write entries on subjects in a similar vein to Wikipedia’s user-contributed encyclopaedia. However, tools will not be available for users to edit or revise content and Google will not act as an advocate - instead a higher page raking will be given to articles that Google deems to be of higher quality.

"The goal is for Knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information to how-to-fix-it instructions," said Manber.

In contrast to Wikipedia, which relies on online donations, contributors can choose whether to let Google place ads on the Knols, with a "substantial" portion of the revenue generated given to the author.

The project is currently in an invitation-only beta stage and allows users to create clean-looking web pages. An example of how an entry would look is already online (about insomnia), which also features the contributor’s photo and short profile - something which Google are keen to emphasise.

"The key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors - but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content," wrote Manber.

The concept of peer reviewed information has already been implemented in various guises on the web. Yahoo!’s "Answers" feature has already proved extremely popular and most blogs allow contributions and comments to the content. Google, itself already has its own reference work, Google Scholar which has around 4.5 million users.

However, the new project represents a huge step for Google, though it will have to go some way to catch up with Wikipedia. Founded in 2001, the world’s largest reference site has more that eight million articles in 253 different languages, from Afrikaans to Zazaki. In October, the site was the eighth most popular online, visited by 107 million people - a third of the "active global internet population", according to analyst firm, Nielsen Online.

Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of search engine news site, Search Engine Land has expressed concerns that the Knol pages would have an unfair advantage over other reference sites.

"My concern in hearing this was that other pages with ratings might not have their information taking in as a quality signal, since Google couldn’t as easily harvest it. Thus, Knol pages might get an unfair advantage. To that, Manber stressed that he didn’t see such signals being used at first, and if they were down the line, Google might seek a way for others to provide similar signals to its search engine," he said.

Despite these reservations, Sullivan believes that "a service like Knol might be necessary to stay competitive" against the likes Microsoft and Yahoo!
Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales, also expressed doubts as to whether Google could provide the necessary "quality content" to compete with more established reference sites.

The project is not the first to distance itself from Google’s search roots. It recently launched its own operating system for mobile devices and looks set to bid for a portion of America’s airwaves with the possibility of building a wireless broadband network.