Personal Background
Ad traffic qualityI am a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, and have been with the company since April 2004. Since June 2009, I have been with the Ad Traffic Quality team, working on datamining and signals for understanding web traffic behavior and preventing click fraud.
Knol
From February 2007 to June 2009, I was the Tech Lead / engineering manager on the Knol project. That work entailed website design and software architecture, writing and posting as Knol Help , coding new features, and trying to facilitate the efforts of other Knol developers (including a few 20%-time contributors who are adding features to Knol.) We began investigating the possibility of doing the project in Feb. 2007. We had a private/tester release in December 2007, and released a public beta in July, 2008. Around January 2009, we celebrated the 100,000th published knol . You can track the team's progress on the Release Notes page. I still occasionally consult on Knol, and have an ongoing interest in the Google Translation integration.
Knol
From February 2007 to June 2009, I was the Tech Lead / engineering manager on the Knol project. That work entailed website design and software architecture, writing and posting as Knol Help , coding new features, and trying to facilitate the efforts of other Knol developers (including a few 20%-time contributors who are adding features to Knol.) We began investigating the possibility of doing the project in Feb. 2007. We had a private/tester release in December 2007, and released a public beta in July, 2008. Around January 2009, we celebrated the 100,000th published knol . You can track the team's progress on the Release Notes page. I still occasionally consult on Knol, and have an ongoing interest in the Google Translation integration.
Since I moved on from Knol, much of the core team has remained the same, and they have continued to add great features: LaTeX equations, the Google Translator Toolkit, and Moderated Collections (leading up to the Public Library of Science effort.) Bill Strathearn has been the tech lead from the Pumi release and onward. Cedric Dupont the product manager. The fastest way to reach them is by replying to any knol written by Knol Help.
What's new? Knol in growing in Arabic.
Search Quality
Prior to Knol, I've worked on machine learning, websearch ranking, result relevance evaluation, universal search quality infrastructure, and Gmail spamfighting.
Computer games
Prior to Google, I worked at AiLive (formerly called "iKuni") developing artificial intelligence middleware for computer games (my former coworker John Funge has a demo of their new product on YouTube. Since then, John's moved on to Netflix.)
Prior to that, in the late 80s, early 90s, I designed and programmed computer games for the IBM PC, Sega Genesis, Macintosh and Amiga.
Software for the movie & television industries
In the mid 90s, at Write Brothers (formerly Screenplay Systems), I developed software for the movie and television industries, including a version of Dramatica and StoryView.
Education
I have a M.S. in Computer Science from UCLA, where I studied artificial intelligence and scientific computing, and B.S.in Computer Science from CSUN.
Questions about Knol?
Post your question as a comment on any page owned by Knol Help. We have a team who can respond to your issues quickly, and if you ask me directly I will probably just forward the question to Knol Help.I have a collection of Meta Knols.





Mark N. Kern
Invite as author
Knol Germany - After one year - deeply disappointed
As an author, who wants to take the opportunity to earn money with knol, im deeply disappointed.
Hope you will do more for your baby. Otherwise I have to go back to a publishing house. They take care, that I get money for my work.
Peter Baskerville
Invite as author
Translations into Global English
If so, I would hope that Knol and Google could look at adding Global English translation to the scope of works. Global English needs to be treated as a new language. It will not only help the predicted 1.5m 2nd English speakers expected to inhabit the globe in the next 5 years, but also makes the huge volume of English language content currently on the net more accessible to every language via better machine translation outcomes.
I wrote a Knol on this topic and discovered this site of scientists trying to automate this process. www.simplish.org/
Hopefully, Knol or Google will add this as a feature some time soon.
I was not specifically aware of "simplish" as a target language for translation or internationalization
Albert Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." I am personally skeptical as to the goal -- both whether simplified English even _is_ a language, and whether the task of translating from complex to simple language without gross semantic loss is anything other than the AI-Complete task of authoring high quality writing (http://en.wikipedia
Cheers,
Michael
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window
Murry Shohat
Invite as author
Best wishes in Ad Traffic Quality
Sorry to see you move to another post but I'm sure it's a career shift. Best wishes. Do we get to know the name of your successor?
Perhaps you'd help out the Knol faithful who have not moved by suggesting to your successor that page views and top pick algorithm have consumed looney weed. PVs haven't budged for about 10 days and the algorithm is wacko.
Speaking of Ad Traffic Quality, wholesale copying of quality Knols is taking place, with republication as new Knols that get adsense traffic. Good for the advertiser but not for the original author. Is this the tip of a wholesale plagiarism effort? Ad Traffic Quality will want to know. This issue cannot happen at competing sites.
Best regards,
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window
Thanks for the well-wishes. Ad Traffic Quality is more of a core responsibility at Google, safeguarding how the business actually makes money. I will continue to advise and consult on Knol as a 20% project, and will try to advocate on behalf of certain uses of Knol, especially the Google Translation integration, which is part of an effort to get high-quality content into languages that are under-served / under-represented on the web.
The Knol project's tech lead is Bill Strathearn, who has been on board from the early prototypes. The Product Manager is still Cedric Dupont, who has been on it almost as long as Bill. And the team is still under the overall direction of Udi Manber, director of Search Quality.
For the last 2 months we have had a rotation of team members who are serving as Knol Help -- if you post bug reports as replies to Knol Help pages, it will reach the team faster than if you send communications directly to me.
The team is working toward some new functionality and use-cases for Knol Collections, and I expect we should see some benefit from that in a few weeks. We have ongoing efforts for Arabic and Indic language knols, that have some momentum.
Cheers,
- Michael
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window
Chair Potato
Invite as author
When?
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window
Narayana Rao K.V.S.S.
Invite as author
Congratulations for Patent
Even though the patent might have been filed long back, I came to know only today and congratulate you and Mr. Strathearn on this achievement.
I do not know whether the feature was already installed on knol or some more improvement to knol will happen at a later stage due to your patented process. But it is a good news for all of us associated with google knol.
I feel advertorials can be a good business opportunity for knol.
I collected and posted my thoughts on this issue in a knol.
http://knol.google.c
We require knols to follow our Content Policy guidelines. Some commercially oriented pages do, but many do not.
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window
Narayana Rao K.V.S.S.
Invite as author
Help in Recruiting More Knol Authors
http://knol.google.c
http://knol.google.c
Knol Foundation
Invite as author
Knol Author Foundation
Maybe you can help us with this or point us in the right direction.
MaiSao Trans became director of the Vietnamese Chapter of the Knol Author foundation. He has this question-
Hi, i am running into this difficulty if you could please help. I need the cite to be users friendly with Vni- fonts so I can update the Vietnamese Knol cite. This font is a user friendly and official used in Vietnam and internationally.
Thanks,
Mai Sao
Thank you for your time
Here is our page on Knol in Different languages.
http://knol.google.c
Most knol related questions will be answered faster if you post to a page owned by Knol Help instead of me. I used to be Knol Help frequently, but now we have others serving in that role.
I added a paragraph on installing fonts -- but that is something which you as users do, Knol cannot install fonts for you. Specifically for VNI I found this page with instructions on installing VNI fonts:
http://www.vnisoft.c
Use with caution -- I do not endorse it, or know anything about it. Please find a trustworthy supplier for fonts in the languages you care about, and if many users in those languages have difficulty in having appropriate fonts, provide Help pages or build a "font resources" list.
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window
Randy K
Invite as author
Name Change
http://knol.google.c
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window
Krishan Maggon
Invite as author
Quality badge and 5* ratings downgrades
Today, I was surprised to see several of my knols now have 4* ratings after revisions in place of 5*?
Global Pharmaceutical Market Review & World Top Ten/Twenty Drugs 2008
My best knol had 8X 5* ratings before revisions and now has 9X4* ratings today? Earlier changes resulted in loss of quality badge. Do I revert to the old system with common and uniform sections?
I suggest that you create a new knol to better explain the Quality badge and star system changes picked up by your current algorithms?
Other knols to suffer downgrades are
Global Diabetes Market Review 2008 & World Top Ten Diabetes drugs
Global Respiratory Market Review & World Top Ten Respiratory Drugs 2008
Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, Diagnostic, Medical Device Industry
Market Research Reports Review (Data Discrepancies)
For the last knol listed, downgrading most difficult to understand as it points out the shortcomings of the $7 billion commercial market research industry. Anyone from that industry can give it a 1* rating to score competitive advantage? I can live with this and have no problems.
These knols are important for me and I get several positive emails from readers. Solicitation for articles from editors of journals has gone up once again both in numbers and frequency
Concerned if my own changes triggered the downgrades?
Krishan Maggon
Invite as author
Quality Badge Attribution
Thus your algorithm is no better than visual measurements with an error of 20%
I read in one of Peter Baskerville knol, that your algorithm qualifies knols as spam or low quality if there are frequent changes/edits in knols and similar content in knols?
By the very nature of methodology used, there is similar content on most of my Global Market Research knols. On top these knols require frequent updating due to constant stream of upcoming data. I hope that your algorithm does not attribute low quality ratings to my knols due to regular input and similar content?
Just to clarify.
Only if you update and save extremely often (like say 30 times in the space of an hour or two) will you be treated as a 'suspect'. This is because by updating often, you keep your Knol on the front page (What's new?) and thereby granting it a better chance of being picked up by the search engines. I had lots of Explorer crashes so I was not taking any chances and saved far too often for the algorithm. That's when I found I was sent to the 'back of the pack'. It should not affect Knols that are updated daily or even a few times within the hour. It's the high volume of saves over a few hours that makes you a suspect. When I made the Knol Team aware of my treatment, the Knol was soon recovered. Now I edit in Chrome and I don't have to save so often for fear of losing my work.
EditSaveCancelDeleteDeleteBlock this userReport abusive commentHide report window