SEARCH giant Google knows better than most just how much rubbish there is on the Web: “Vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing” is the way the company diplomatically phrased the situation in a statement.

So it has launched a new product called Knol, a Wikipedia-like fountain of “authorative articles.” The company has been testing the Knol service for several months, but yesterday made the service available to everyone.

And its all about user-generated data. Accountable user-generated data.

“The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content,” Google product manager Cedric Dupont and software engineer Michael McNally said on the company blog.

“It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good,” the creators said.

Knols include community tools which allow for modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol.

And Google is promising that authors can make money from their contributions if they wish.

“At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements,” the company said.