"There are two articles about Sarah Palin on Google Knol, the search company's abysmal new Wikipedia-like reference guide," Farhad Manjoo writes. One is poorly written, the other copied-and-pasted from Wikipedia. Manjoo spent weeks reading through Knol articles (for which we offer our deepest sympathies) and found, unsurprisingly, lots of content from other sources and business promoters looking for a little Google juice. In other words, Knol has spawned lots of content meant to game Google's Search, just like the Web has filled with the same crap from SEOs and linkfarmers meant to generate AdSense revenue or Web site traffic with a minimum of effort. In fact, there's a Knol article on how to do just that. It does have lots of cute puppies.

Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales's for-profit search engine, Wikia Search, will go into a public beta on January 7, according to reports. (Good luck emailing Wales for access to the private beta going on now — he doesn't even answer messages from Bono.) The site — we hear it looks a lot like Facebook — will face competition from Google's Knol. It's also likely to be mentioned in the same breath as Jason Calacanis's people-powered search engine, Mahalo. Which means a lot of heavy breathing will be forthcoming from L.A.