Knol sells steamcleaning equipment, not domain names!

Written on 25th July 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

By now anyone who’s interested in the next web knows about the public beta release of Google Knol, the Google-owned Wikipedia killer that actually reminds me more of Squidoo than the free encyclopedia we’ve all grown accustomed to seeing pop up in the first search results for a whole lot of keywords. And if you’re not interested in the next web, you’ll soon get to know Google Knol too. Some ‘knols’ (units of knowledge) have already started getting spectacular rankings in Google’s search engine, a trend that will no doubt continue.

But rather than speculating if that’s good or evil, I noticed something funny when looking up more information about Google Knol. I wound up on Knol.com, which is home to a Netherlands-based steamcleaning equipment vendor. They’re featuring news releases on their homepage, and one of them was about the launch of Google Knol, which obviously drove quite some traffic to their website as well.

It’s in Dutch, so let me give you the rundown: after the blog post from Google announcing the public beta launch, the company received tens of thousands of visitors from over 130 countries to their website. Knol appreciates the fact that so many heads are now turned in their direction (despite the fact that it’s bound to be quite irrelevant traffic, I might add) thanks to Google, but they want to make it clear that they will not be evaluating any offers for their domain name, which is now obviously worth a lot more than last week. This is the part of the news release that made me smile:

“NOTE: We sell steamcleaning equipment and don’t sell our domain !!”

I’m left wondering if Google got in touch with the company themselves, and how much cash they would be prepared to throw at them for acquiring the domain.