Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia • Hacker News Board

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#71

Post by cryptnoob » Wed, Apr 14, 2010, 3:47 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #58

elblanco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might work better if they just presented a list of results, and users could up/down vote the results for relevancy. Overtime they could use that feedback to float more relevant "snippets" to the top. Kinda like wikipedia but without all the hassle of typing.

What about allowing users to re-order the snippets by draw and drop - or at least move up, move down, and reject buttons? Maybe even allow suggested snippets too - sort of like Wikipedia built from nothing but citations.

How about using mouse tracking like the page analytics guys do. What people are hovering their mouse over is what their reading ... and that constitutes a "vote".

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#72

Post by swombat » Wed, Apr 14, 2010, 4:04 PM UTC

thorax wrote: post #65

hristov wrote: post #14

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…

What if they had a disclosure (maybe until things get "better") at the top in bright bold red that said: "Cpedia will quite often be wrong or odd. The web is quirky and we're trying to make sense of it. Don't take anything below seriously just yet. Let us know what parts of this article you like, though." Would that make people criticize them less or give them more slack?

That would still be incorrect. For all the searches I tried (including a number of people for whom "other people write more about them than they write themselves" is true) the results are laughably bad.

Maybe if they changed it to: "Cpedia will almost always be wrong and nonsensical."

But then, why release it?

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#73

Post by terryjsmith » Wed, Apr 14, 2010, 4:29 PM UTC

It reads to me like he is defending his team. I would bet that the people behind the scenes are feeling pretty down and for the most part unfairly: there was so much hype built up about this company, if they didn't completely nail it the first time they were doomed to fail in the eyes of the community.

I agree with the others here that he would get more sympathy if he was less snarky, but I imagine he's dealing with a lot of emotion from his team. I couldn't imagine trying to build a company with so much pressure, such an intelligent group of people and all of the negative press at the same time; what a nightmare.

Re: Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

#74

Post by lmkg » Wed, Apr 14, 2010, 4:37 PM UTC

braindead_in wrote: post #26

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…

As a engineer, I sympathize with him completely. I would react the same if I had worked on a really really tough problem and made an incremental advance, which I thought was a breakthrough, but everybody dished it because they didn't understand it. Not to say what Cuil is doing a great job. But Machine learning and NLP is a tough thing.

I appreciate that it's a hard project and I appreciate the work that's gone into it. NLP is hard, and any progress in it is always amazing and a worthwhile endevor. However, the measure of a product is not how hard you worked on it, but how well it works.

Cuil/cpedia doesn't work. They shouldn't be releasing it as if it were a product. Progress towards the solution is great, but unless it reaches or almost reaches the solution, it should be published in an academic journal.

By releasing it in the wild, you set an expectation for how much progress has been made. Blaming the user for not understanding the problem is incorrect; the user is not supposed to see the problem in the first place. If your users need to understand the problems that you've had under the hood, then your product isn't ready for prime time.