Knol
Search for any subject on Google and one of the first, if not the first, entry will be from Wikipedia. If Google had its way, a search would instead have led you to Knol. Much like Wikipedia, Knol compiled user-written articles on a wide range of topics and promised contributors a revenue stream. That is, if you wrote content worth reading, you could have made some cash from it. Google just didn’t put much effort into the website, and without the proper resources, Knol faded into the background as Wikipedia grew its database empire.
About four years after launching Knol, Google announced that knols (a unit of knowledge) would no longer be viewable, and urged content creators to download and export them. On October 1, 2012, the service was dissolved.
