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We could be seeing a major battle in the making between Amazon and Google (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) down the road.

Look at what Amazon’s been having a huge amount of success with lately: their S3 storage and server processes. They are building out datacenters and bulking up servers, quietly getting more and more companies and developers to use them as their server infrastructure. Their recent S3 competition had the winners taking a giant gold hammer to a server. The message: you don’t need servers to scale, you need us.

Let’s not forget Amazon tried to take on Google with Alexa search and failed, then they tried OpenSearch and didn’t make a dent. The new battlefront is hosting.

Meanwhile Google is offering mostly ad-supported products and services with clean UI where they provide the hosting. At first glimpse one might wonder why Google wants to be in the content business. If you’re in the content business you have to deal with spammers.

Controlling how the world’s information is searched is largely impacted by having the data at your disposal. The more direct control Google has over the information, as they do by hosting, the easier they can combat spam and search what they feel is the best content. Google is extremely careful to clarify what I italicized there, by saying it is what each individual user deems the best content, but Google — and any search engine — already decides what is the best on some level in the way the results are returned.

Ranking.

This is becoming very tantalizing with news of their Google Knol project. In their own words, Google Knol:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

This sounds like a promising, worthwhile project and history shows that not everything Google does is a runaway hit. A lot of what they do, most of what they do frankly, isn’t as successful as their search and Adwords.

Writers could always write, long before Google and long after Google is gone. Do writers want to make Google the new Random House? It’s one thing for Google to organize the world’s information, but they are fast becoming the hosting company of the world’s information with only Amazon as their major competition on this front.

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to wonder if I want Google to be my hosting company. Giving any one entity too much control and power requires a huge amount of responsibility.

Can we continue to trust Google to do the right thing?

The growing Google content business
Google has already been in the content hosting business since buying Blogger from Pyra Labs. The number of Google content-related projects include, and this list is incomplete, the following services:

Blogger - create and store your own blog, hosted by Google
Google Base - store items that rank better in search
Google Code - download APIs and open source code
Google Page Creator - create and share your own hosted web pages
Jaiku - mobile microblogging service like Twitter
Picasa - store and share pictures
YouTube and Google Video - share and store videos created

It’s way too early to speculate on what impact Google Knol will have, it’s in invite-only stage at this point, but if it can make the list above as a viable alternative to the heavily spammed Squidoo and what Techdirt labels too early to call Mahalo, I’m sure both those services won’t be pleased.

As for being any competition to Wikipedia? Predictably, many are out there already talking and speculating too. Remember how Google offered at one time to host Wikipedia and was denied? Google would rather host Wikipedia than compete against it. But what do they do when they are denied? They find another path to take. Welcome to Google Knol.

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