Knowledge is power and Google, the primary search engine for many of the world’s knowledge seekers, wants both: knowledge and power.

Google is unveiling what they hope will be another useful and lucrative product in a long line of Google offerings. This creation is an online “author centric” encyclopedia they call Knol, which is short for, you guessed it, “knowledge.” It’s Google’s unique take on what Wikipedia already offers.

Except that, unlike Wikipedia’s model (collective knowledge mixed with somewhat dubious authority), the Knol author is highlighted front and center and, if successful, the author gets paid! That is if enough mouse clickers poke around their authoritative pages (sharing the revenue from strategically placed Google ads).

Whereas most anyone can “edit” a Wikipedia entry, only a Knol author can tweak a Knol entry. If you don’t like what you see written in a Knol, then Google wants you to write your own Knol.

Let the best Knol win. Forbes says:

The project, which is described as “experimental” by Google could be seen as good news for wiki-heads hoping to make money from the same specialized knowledge they give to Wikipedia for free.

But it set off jitters among those in the search business who worry that it represents another step by Google to become a Web publisher as well as a search engine. Increasingly, they contend, Google-produced pages could fill the search engine’s results and push out other publishers’ content.

There are already howls aplenty that Google is becoming more than just a search engine (they already own YouTube, Picasa and Blogger to name a few) and will, by designed default, direct users to Google Knols by ranking the Knols pages higher than say Wikipedia’s pages (which gets a ton of traffic and hosts no ads). Google claims they will not do this (a healthy dose of skepticism might apply here). Will it hurt Wikipedia? Salon’s Farhad Manjoo argues that it could actually help the accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries.

Knol differs in a key way from the popular everyone-pitches-in encyclopedia, and as a result, both could prosper, offering different bits of knowledge for different purposes, and different audiences. In fact, by adding more experts to the Web, Knol, if it takes off, will probably improve Wikipedia, not kill it off.

It’s a big Internet and there’s room for everyone. Here’s what Google has to say about Knols.