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Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

thegi.st

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Re: Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

#11

Post by stkbach »

inaseer wrote: post #10

The web is a big place. What's the strategy around seeding it with useful gists so it can gain critical mass? Have you thought about focusing on a niche (say, TED talks?) or possibly automatically summarizing pages? The latter could be tricky as incorrectly or poorly summarized pages would detract users from the site.

It does automatically summarize any text heavy articles.

For example:

bbc.com/news thewashingtonpost.com huffingtonpost.com reuters.com cnn.com theglobeandmail.com theguardian.com en.wikipedia.org

Go to any of those as a start and submit one of the articles you find and everything suggested by @gist was generated by an algorithm.

Our hope is that will help get the ball rolling. We are certainly very subject to network effects, so focusing on a niche and providing tremendous value to that one vertical is a good strategy.

Re: Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

#12

Post by inaseer »

stkbach wrote: post #11
inaseer wrote: post #10

The web is a big place. What's the strategy around seeding it with useful gists so it can gain critical mass? Have you thought about focusing on a niche (say, TED talks?) or possibly automatically summarizing pages? The latter could be tricky as incorrectly or poorly summarized pages would detract users from the site.

It does automatically summarize any text heavy articles. For example: bbc.com/news thewashingtonpost.com huffingtonpost.com reuters.com cnn.com theglobeandmail.com theguardian.com en.wikipedia.org Go to any of those as a start and submit one of the articles you find and everything suggested by @gist was generated by an algorithm. Our hope is that will help get the ball rolling. We are certainly very subject to networ…

Ah, your landing page should make that abundantly clear. That's a very cool feature.

I tried a couple of articles on Washington Post and the algorithm did a decent job. I then read the gist first before reading an article, and while some sentences were a little hard to understand w/o the surrounding context, I felt I still got a decent summary. I can see myself skimming the article through this service instead of relying solely on my eye balls when scanning through.

Couple of suggestions:

- Linking the extracted sentences back to the original page if I want the surrounding context - A tool/browser plug-in which can allow me to select a representative sentence from the story and submit to gist

Seems like a useful stand alone service as it is; having people vote on and submit gists themselves would be cherry on top.

Re: Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

#13

Post by stkbach »

inaseer wrote: post #12
stkbach wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does automatically summarize any text heavy articles. For example: bbc.com/news thewashingtonpost.com huffingtonpost.com reuters.com cnn.com theglobeandmail.com theguardian.com en.wikipedia.org Go to any of those as a start and submit one of the articles you find and everything suggested by @gist was generated by an algorithm. Our hope is that will help get the ball rolling. We are certainly very subject to networ…

Ah, your landing page should make that abundantly clear. That's a very cool feature. I tried a couple of articles on Washington Post and the algorithm did a decent job. I then read the gist first before reading an article, and while some sentences were a little hard to understand w/o the surrounding context, I felt I still got a decent summary. I can see myself skimming the article through this service instead of rel…

Thanks! There is a browser plugin planned that will show you the gists of any url you navigate to, and additionally could show the gists of links on a page before you click on them...

Re: Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

#14

Post by johnny_r »

granolagirl wrote: post #3

A gist 'filter' or something would be easier, just on all the time, instead of cut and paste the url. easy if it were a pop up that kicks in automatically everytime you go to a new web site or hover over a link - could fade out after 5 seconds if not hovered over ?

Agreed granolagirl. Just a masking of the site should Gist be turned on, with a quick link or click away feature to the source.

First tests are pretty damn impressive though. Gist'd (is that even the right verb?) a couple of wiki pages and found the summary quite useful, and surprisingly, grammatically correct. Will stay tuned for sure.

Re: Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

#18

Post by stkbach »

norednoproblem wrote: post #17

I wish it didn't offer so many 'gists' - three is enough

Ya, it returns about 1/6 of the sentences in the documents as gists. For an item with 12 sentences, 2 is too few, but for something with 100 sentences, 17 is too many.

We'll probably change the ratio to scale in a smarter way rather than a constant fraction.

Re: Show HN: gi.st – the gist of the web

#20

Post by stkbach »

telephoto wrote: post #19

Do you have plans for giving it the capability of analyzing images as well as text?

In the distant future, but as of right now we're focused more on text and getting humans to start participating. The machine learning approaches we're using are getting better every day, and the latest deep learning techniques are showing promise with pictures, so that is certainly a possibility down the road.
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