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
BlogoscopedDe 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.
Domains
Google Knol Search engines Social Web Software Web 2.0 
February 8th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Well thanks for the respect, it was fun for as long it lasted, the customer was sure happy with the extra attention for sure, and the servers did keep up with it pretty well. It got a bit harder when another customer decided to stunt as well with one of their sites. But we managed to get trough without showing any errors
Now we just wait for google to mention the name again