It’s no wonder why they say it’s all about interaction with users that counts these days. With social media and community such as Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin already gaining lots of attention, the search engine wants a piece of the pie too.
But it seems like search engines are all taking a different approach. Instead of building momentum on the traditional social model of uploading photos and connecting between people/friends etc, search engines are leveraging on their technology to do what they had been always good at – text contents.
And what else can be better then to get other other people to write content on your site, ask questions, offer their solutions and share some knowledge?
Google Knol is one such platform that sells the idea of having author(s) share their knowledge where other users can comment. Author(s) still possess the moderations rights in the end. I’m quite skeptical about the idea and I can let SearchEngineLand talk for me on how I feel about it.
Overall, I still lean toward not wanting Google to do this. I remain concerned that by hosting this content, it plays too much in the content owner space when its core business is supposed to be driving traffic outbound to others. Hosting content sets up inherent conflicts that over time start to erode the trust people have in Google, I feel.
On the other hand, Microsoft QnA encourage users to ask and reply to questions too. As if we don’t have enough QnA sites already. Oh, and there’s Amazon AskVille too.
To me, they are more then QnA sites. If you look it in another way, they are merely another type of communication and marketing channel for you to market, build reputation and backlinks. And yeah, for spamming too.
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