Knol.com suddenly worth a lot of money

You should be so lucky as to be the owner of the domain knol.com, on the glorious day that Google decides to launch an encyclopaedia (comparable to Wikipedia) that will go by the name of Knol. For the time being, this encyclopaedia can be found at the URL http://knol.google.com, but Google would love to get their hands on the somewhat more accessible address Knol.com.

And that’s a very good thing for the Knol family (from Dordrecht), which has owned the domain knol.com for years as a business card for their company that sells vacuum cleaners and steam cleaners.

According to an article published in AD, Google already made a “six-figure offer” for the domain name. The company manager refused the offer because it isn’t interesting enough – apparently, Dutch tax authorities would retain 52 % of this sum. Things would only get interesting with a seven-figure sum on the table.

Meanwhile, the company is enjoying all the media attention that it can get. Even the influential American magazine Forbes has approached the Knol company. And that, of course, rhymes with excellent publicity for this Dutch business…