This was news to me when I read it at the Time Online. The gist of the article, as I understand it, is that Google will solicit content article writers who can share in advertising earnings. This knowledge database will compete with Wikipedia, per the article: "Google is to go head-to-head with Wikipedia, the web's largest reference work, in a clash of two of the internet's most powerful brands."

Interestingly, this is apparently planned as non-collaborative content, whereby content creators will effectively rival each other. This description made it sound sort of like Squidoo to me. In addition to its current search results (and other) pages, Google will also be able to advertise on content pages that it controls.

This is hardly Google's first move into the content space though for me it represents something new. I'm interested to learn more about this and to see how it unfolds.