Google(GOOG) has just announced public opening of their new wiki-knowledge product called “Knol”.

After months of deliberation since December of last year, this project is finally open for people to use.

Let’s take a quick look:

For responding to a Knol subject such as this Lung Cancer article, the user can leave a review with a rating.  This supposedly validates the experts’ writing and becomes part of Knol’s rating system.

Knol also let’s you leave comments.  I believe the comments section is really for those quick comments but the review section should be used for expert reviewers of that subject.

Let’s take a look at the writing aspects of Knol.  You can write a new Knol yourself but you need to stay within these guidelines:

The Knol project is a site that hosts many knols — units of knowledge — written about various subjects. The authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments. Users can provide feedback, comments, related information. So the Knol project is a platform for sharing information, with multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information.

Knols are indexed by the big search engines, of course. And well-written knols become popular the same as regular web pages. The Knol site allows anyone to write and manage knols through a browser on any computer.

Writing a good Knol can definitely boost your SEO and online visibility, especially you are good at what you write about.

Here’s a screenshot of writing a new Knol.  It looks pretty simple and basically it’s like Wikipedia but easier to use.

I don’t know how popular this Knol Project will become but I am sure many webmasters will take advantage of the early SEO you can gain from writing expertise articles.

Knol Resources

Knol Website

How to Write Good Knols

Basics of Writing Knols

Google Translate, a free translator provided by Google (GOOG), now is capable of translating 10 more languages. WIth Google Translate AJAX API for API developers in place, Google should be able to keep adding more and more languages as time goes on.

In addition, Google translate can now detect a language of the site you are trying to translate as seen here:

Nice feature Googlers.

…and that’s great news any way you say it. Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible. As part of the machine translation team within Google Research, I’m happy to report we’ve been hard at work to overcome this challenge. We’ve recently added translation capabilities for 10 new languages to Google Translate, bringing the total to 23 languages. The newly featured languages include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.

In addition, you can now translate text and web pages as well as perform cross-language searches between any two languages that we offer. For example, we now support Chinese translation to/from any of our languages (e.g., Chinese to French). So for those of you who will be following or attending the Olympics in Beijing this fall, you’ll be able to more easily find and access content from local sources.

via Google Blog

Yahoo Glue just launched in India. Basically, Yahoo Glue combines classic search results with visual content aggregated from major websites.

Why is it not launched in the US?

Well, they are probably beta-testing the service in India before deciding to go mainstream.

The service looks pretty good except that the Yahoo Glue option is only available for popular search terms. I tried, “Zedomax” and got nothing for Glue. Well, maybe I am asking too much for their beta search engine.

Yahoo India has rolled out “Glue,” a test of a new search product that combines news, images, videos, and other content from around the Web (and other Yahoo properties) along with traditional search results that link to web pages. The coolest part I’ve found so far is the integration of Yahoo Answers

via mashable