At Technologizer, Harry McCracken searched for some pretty obvious topics at Google's Knol to see how well it is doing, and the results are less than impressive. First, it failed to find some articles on a standard search, and then some it did find (Steve Wozniak, Sarah Palin) were based on Wikipedia entries.
Which brings up the "authors" of the two entries which crib from Wikipedia: The Palin one is credited to Sam Goldfarb and the Woz one to Jean Jacques Frapsauce (actually "jean jacques frapsauce".) It's possible that these gents contributed to the Wikipedia articles that they appear to have cut-and-pasted into Knol, but they certainly weren't solely responsible for them. They're taking credit for the work of others, and because their Knol versions of the entries aren't editable, they're not just copies of Wikipedia's entries - they're fundamentally flawed copies.
To sum up: Knol has some poor quality articles, and features poor quality articles on its home page. Some articles are basically ripped off from Wikipedia, and "the Knol search engine in its current form seems to be broken".
