Knol Under the Hood

Limits on content string length

Some text fields within knol have limitations on the amount of text they can contain.

Section	Length in Unicode characters	Approximate length in English word count (*)
Title	250	33
Summary	1000	133
Reference	2000	267
Answer in review scorecard	300	40
Comment	5000	667
Author name	100	13
Author location and occupation	250	33

(*) The approximate length in English word count is calculated assuming 6.5 letters plus one punctuation character (including spaces) per word.

The main text field does not have a specific limit, but the usability of the text editor degrades as the text grows longer. If your knol is longer than about ten or twenty screens of content, we suggest you consider breaking it up into multiple separate knols.

Websearch Snippets and the HTML meta description

When people search on google.com or other search engines, the search results page shows "snippets" with each search result. For example, the query [knol insomnia manber] today returns this as its result:

Insomnia - a knol by Rachel Manber

Knol pages are HTML documents, and HTML documents may contain a meta description tag. Search engines often use a web pages meta description tag to create your search result snippet. Your browser can let you see the HTML source for a web page, so you can see the meta description directly.

• In Firefox, go to a knol and select View > Page Source in the browser's menu.
• In Internet Explorer, select .

As an example, the meta description for Rachel Manber's Insomnia knol is this:

<meta name="description" content="Insomnia is a treatable sleep disorder. 
This article explains how insomnia develops and how it can be treated. 
It also..." />

Knol generates the meta description automatically, using the summary (if not empty) otherwise the main content.