Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

I don't realize why the people are pushing down an effort to give us more power of choice in our searches. There is a lot of room to improve? Sure. Let's support the improvements.

Haters gonna hate

Sometimes, big companies like the one I work for (Microsoft) or Google or Yahoo get beaten up for having 'obvious' bugs or failures. People say that given the scale of our resources, we should do better and perhaps they're right.

In this case, here's a small startup trying out something new and potentially cool. Sure, it doesn't work well in some (maybe many) cases but atleast they're putting themselves out there. That takes way more guts than what a lot of people have. This probably represents several late nights and weekends feverishly pounding out code and trying to get things to work.

As an engineer, I'm with Cuil.

To quote Roosevelt " It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

I think it may be the format the result is presented in. It acts as if it can give the world then gives very little. If they were upfront about the level it is at by making the design more about listing pieces of information rather than trying to assume they all mesh together nicely they may get better reviews.

How it's presented is a huge part of why people reacted so negatively. They present the articles as prose, so people expect it to flow like prose. This makes them very sensitive to disorganization.

I think they're deserving of the criticism they've received. Cpedia is an interesting idea, and I assume they've done a lot of really good work we're not grasping. But it's not ready for public consumption yet, and they shouldn't have pretended it was.

They were over-zealous. It happens. What's important is how they move ahead. I'm with wheels on this one. We shouldn't write them off yet.