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Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

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Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#11

Post by Qz »

Article seems well written, and I can forgive the defensiveness given how much bile was spat in their direction.

When I saw the cpedia article on here I also thought it was stupid. With the explanation it makes a lot more sense what it's trying to accomplish. A little blurb on each cpedia page with a summary of that explanation would probably do wonders.

He's right though, often when I google something, there might be 20000 results, but only 3 with unique info. Solving that problem is a reasonable goal, and it's a bit ridiculous to all point and say 'look, they didn't solve it perfectly, hahaha'.

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#12

Post by allend »

If your site is called -pedia, guess what - users expect a wikipedia like encyclopedia that is useful.

It doesn't matter how incredibly sophisticated your algorithms are or how smart you are.

It doesn't matter how hard the problems are or even if they are solvable.

It doesn't matter that you know much more about linguistics than anyone else.

If the end result shown to the user is utter rubbish for _their_ purposes, then you can expect the users to complain and not come back.

If this was supposed to be a tech demo called c-dredger or info-frankenstein then it certainly is an accomplishment. But as a useful tool, it needed more work before being shown.

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#13

Post by gojomo »

pak wrote: post #4

Cpedia: Telling You Whether Your VC Over-Imbibes Since 2010 seriously though, he's trying to construct an argument around the necessity of bottom-feeding for information?

It seems he is.

Let's grant that 'digging deep' means a certain number of gems -- like the fact your next meeting is with someone who drinks too much.

But as Tom Costello admits, this approach also "ensure[s] that we will have mistakes". If those mistakes are similar to the gems -- like erroneously associating a report of drinking too much with the wrong person -- I'm not sure that makes the case that the "bottom-feeding" was worth it.

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#14

Post by hristov »

Sorry, they deserve all the criticism they are getting. The problem is not that they have few mistakes here and there, it is that every single article I have tried has been composed of a bunch of mostly incomprehensible unrelated sentences randomly ordered and placed next to each other with no connection.

If you evoke an encyclopaedia in the mind of your user, the user will expect what they are getting is an at least somewhat encyclopaedia-like thing. I.e., that it is understandable, that sentences follow each other to make coherent paragraphs, etc. In this respect, Cpedia completely falls on their faces.

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#15

Post by nash »

pak wrote: post #4

Cpedia: Telling You Whether Your VC Over-Imbibes Since 2010 seriously though, he's trying to construct an argument around the necessity of bottom-feeding for information?

Maybe there is something to this...

If I was trying to get funding for cpedia, I'd want to know which VCs get drunk easily...

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#16

Post by nash »

duskwuff wrote: post #5

I've mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it - the length of this article: http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=United+States+of+America should be embarrassing. I mean, really ? (On the other hand, it's the only country which I've so far been able to get CPedia to spit out any sort of article for. Japan? China? Germany? Russia? Brazil? France? It can't seem to see the forest for the trees -- it's got articles on historical leade…

Try the countries full name.

For instance there is some garbage about China under: http://cpedia.com/search?q=Peoples%20Republic%20of%20China

Of course it seems to be something about contract law for China... but that's another matter.

Actually try "of china": It's got some relevance, so does "peoples republic".

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#17

Post by isani »

duskwuff wrote: post #5

I've mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it - the length of this article: http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=United+States+of+America should be embarrassing. I mean, really ? (On the other hand, it's the only country which I've so far been able to get CPedia to spit out any sort of article for. Japan? China? Germany? Russia? Brazil? France? It can't seem to see the forest for the trees -- it's got articles on historical leade…

Cpedia seems to have trouble with terms that frequently appear in other phrases. For example, they don't have an article on Nokia, but do have Nokia 6300, Nokia N70 and so on.

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#19

Post by wheels »

lionhearted wrote: post #6

My first inclination was towards disliking the writer - he comes across as arrogant and dismissive of massive criticism, which seems foolish given his position. If he said something a little more humble, he'd be infinitely more sympathetic. Perhaps something like, "We're trying to do something meaningful, and still working to get it right" would go over well. So my first inclination was dislike. But my second was mor…

I wouldn't write Cuil off just yet. What the do have is a functional, if not stellar, web scale search engine and a web scale crawler. They've also probably got enough money to keep the lights on for another 2-3 years (perhaps with some cuts) while they figure out where to steer that.

That's why I was somewhat surprised with this play. I don't connect the dots. If they'd spun into say, domain specific searches (a la Kayak, Indeed) or some sort of data mining for business (a la Rapleaf) that'd have clicked more with me.

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