Jan 02

Mid december 2007 Google announced its Wikipedia competitor “Knol” (what a name…). My guess is that it will be a huge “success” like Google Checkout (lesson: bad idea to come up with an alternative to a monopoly — especially years later — even when you’re Google) and that only people who also buy iphones will cheer (sorry for the sarcasm ;-) ).

But what is funny is that the domain Knol.com doesn’t even belong to Google. It’s owned by a dutch cleaning company that sells vacuum cleaners and steam cleaning equipment. They’re pretty happy about the additional free traffic they receive and even thank Google for that on their site:

Knol Stoomreinigingssystemen wil o.a. de volgende sites bedanken : Google
040 Hosting
nu.nl
Webwereld
TechCrunch
Blogoscoped

De aandacht is echt overweldigend !

Translation: “Knol steam cleaning systems wants to thank the following sites (among others ) […] the attention is really overwhelming!”

How can a company in the internet age decide on a product name without checking the associated domains first? All these people who type-in “www.knol.com” and only find vacuum cleaners? Tsk tsk tsk :-)

Oh and respect for their sys admin - the site is still up despite the traffic.

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