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Yesterday Google announced that it intends to launch a new service called Knols, which Techcrunch has dubbed a “user-generated authoritative online knowledgebase of everything.”

The basis behind Knols (which stands for “unit of knowledge”) is sort of a combination of Wikipedia and Squidoo – users will create and manage their own articles (knolls) on various topics. Other users will be able to submit feedback, but it’s each author’s responsibility to edit the content. This could raise the question of the accuracy of information, but more than one user can create a knol on any given topic, so the idea is that the best articles will rise in popularity and drown out the rest. Oh, yeah, and the authors can choose whether or not to get paid. If an author opts to have advertising appear on his/her page, he/she gets a portion of the ad revenues.

It sounds like a smart idea, but not everyone is excited about this move. Word around the blogosphere is that Google may be overstepping its bounds. Google started out as a simple, loveable, relevant search engine. But its latest moves have been leaving some wondering where the company is going. Ars technica asks, “What possible reason does the company have for moving beyond indexing and into the hosting and control of this sort of content?”

The question for this particular project is one of pure conflict of interest. If Google has a Wikipedia-like know-it-all service, paid for with Ads by Google, what incentive does it have to keep its search results objective? Techcrunch also points out Google’s latest move regarding video search. The dots connect like this: Google owns YouTube. Google use to offer video search on the front of its search page. It moved video search to the “more” option. Then, it added YouTube to the “more” option. But when you click on YouTube it doesn’t return search results from YouTube, it just takes you to the YouTube home page, so then you have to search for the video again. What’s the point of this? Most of the regular video search results turn up YouTube videos anyway.

The blogosphere can be quick to paranoia at times, but these moves do at least beg questions of conflict of interest.

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