Google has announced the expansion of its online encyclopedia Knol into new languages, opening up the service for spam in three new languages.
Google Knol now supports French, Italian or German along with its native English spam, a move that is sure to be welcomed by spammers in some of Europe’s biggest countries.
Knol launched in July 2008 and was immediately billed as a Wikipedia killer by some, by offering shared ad payments against every page. But the encyclopedia with paying Adsense ads quickly became the target of spammers ; the ideal of a free-for-all anyone can post anything promoted by Google was naturally abused about 5 seconds after they hit the on button.
Bonus points to AFP for this description of the service “Google on Thursday made its version of communally-constructed online encyclopedia Wikipedia multi-lingual, opening its Knol compendium to nuggets of knowledge shared in French, Italian or German.” Sounds like a well rounded Knol entry to me ?
