Cuil itself is still there. But yeah that's pretty bad.
Here's one of the first grafs on "cuil" in cpedia:
Best Web Hosting Offer Cuil launches with an index of 120 billion web pages making it a most comprehensive magic! Affiliate Secrets search engine on the web and also a potential try to get the Google competitor. Clickbooth Cuil but not avail due to flooding traffics and making their servers 'too hot' to handle. After googling Cuil is down at the moment to 'cool' down.
Interesting, very optimistic project.. Put it just produces a mash of out of context snippets. The biggest problem is that it seems unable to identify introductory information very well, or eliminate references due to news items. I tried a couple of things:
Hello Peter, since you have one of the most widely read Ruby sites, I am not surprised that you showed up. Makes sense if you think abut how they implemented this. I agree with your comments.
Wow, yeah. The first section is Merb ... ok. Then there's a ROR subsection of Merb. Um, what? And the first paragraph of the ROR subsection clearly was copied and pasted from some consultancy's "Our decicated RoR developers can create web 2.0 applications using latest Ruby on Rails web services." (Ok, not quite copied and pasted. They managed to work in a typo ("decicated").)
And then the paragraph immediately after that doesn't follow at all. It starts:
>When he [Brian Mastenbrook] was able to reproduce the glitch at Basecamp, he began to suspect that the flaw was inherent to Ruby on Rails, the popular Web framework used by both websites.
>I find Cpedia best on topics that I thought I knew about. I find out things I should have known but didn’t. I’ve noticed productivity has slowed in the company since we have had it up for internal testing, as people ask each other about stranger and stranger trivia, or exclaim, “I didn’t know your middle name was Hector?”
Were this done correctly, it would be an amazing feat of NLP. Unfortunately, it is not... You can't just mash snippets together piecemeal. Context matters.
I'm surprised they even released it; the few search terms I attempted generated useless results.
Demand Media must be relieved. Despite all the jokes, Cuil's team has a very impressive background. But they've just made it clear that the cheapest way to create prose online is still to pay people $10-$15 per article.
Closest thing in colloquial english is 'douche chills'
In Dutch it's called 'plaatsvervangende schaamte' which literally means "place exchanging shame". Shame felt on behalf of someone else, shame you feel someone else should feel. I'm embarrassed for them.
Yeah agreed. Look at their results for "apple". Nothing about apple as a fruit or the company Apple. But they got "apple bottom" jeans covered. http://cpedia.com/search?q=apple
This is useful because I thought about something similar: clustering text, and using my auto-summarization library to extract key bits and then stich things together.
This looks like a hobbyist effort built by somebody messing around with too big of a dataset. Anybody with even a smattering of NLP background could have predicted this quality of results. Computers are simply too stupid to assemble coherent narrative summaries on specific topics. They would require a true AI, and all of the major efforts that might build such a thing (Cyc, Semantic Web, etc.) have produced very little of value in the area.
Last I checked, Google's crawler treated 4xx errors on a /robots.txt (which includes unauthorized/not-allowed) the same as 404-not-found. (In most cases, it's a configuration error by the site owner, and for those sites where it's intentional, the operator is savvy enough to block crawler access to other URLs by password or user-agent if desired.)
Mine is way worse: "Careful, blasdelf ineptness is one of their core competencies. Sounds like copyright infringement." -- http://cpedia.com/search?q=blasdelf
I really don't understand cuil. I feel really bad criticizing someone's hard work, but this company is not a one man operation; it's a team of smart, experienced people with tens of millions of dollars of venture capital. They must be aware of their reputation and that they are the butt of jokes for exactly the kind of stuff we are now seeing in cpedia. What is the strategy? Do they think they can just ride out having such a bad repuation while they try to perfect the service?
"it's a team of smart people with tens of millions of dollars of venture capital."
This is probably a weakness, not a strength. If cuil were a bootstrapped one-person operation it would be very easy to cut the cord and move on to something else.
And the "us" vs "them" mentality. It's much easier to fall into for smart, sane people when they're surrounded by other people doing the same thing. After all, if it's so nuts, why doesn't Joanna / Bob quit?. Social proof.
"If cuil were a bootstrapped one-person operation it would be very easy to cut the cord and move on to something else."
Or actually get it to work,like DuckDuckGo. One man operation. Impressive results. Contrasting DuckDuckGo and Cuil is enlightening in all kinds of ways.
I agree. I don't have any brand loyalty to search engines- if Cuil worked better, I'd use it. But I search for 'world war two' and the 4th result is "Scott's World War Two Page", which Chrome warns me could be hosting malware. I like some of Cuil's ideas, but it just doesn't work.
Read literally, Paul Krill was the author of the entire article after the summary.
Because this content is pieced together by computers who have no idea of how the resulting piece reads as a whole, I wonder if there are hidden legal liabilities when words get stuffed into people's mouths or when the combinations of sections lead to false content (imagine one paragraph ending with "and found the following to be completely false:").
You would expect something with a disambiguation page for your search, and a topic-specific page for what you are looking for would have relevant information on that topic, but:
I think you guys are missing the big picture here. This is a brilliant PR move. The hilarity contained in this thing is on par with encyclopedia dramatica. It will become part of the 4chan, lolcats web culture and what can be better than that?
Are we sure this isn't just an experiment of theirs? Some 20% project from one of their engineers using info they already had at their disposal?
For a side experiment, I'm not going to fault or bash any company-- we've got a few of our own experiments which aren't the prettiest/best sites in the world.
Well, it does sound like the know it's more of a long-shot "weird" idea and they call it an "alpha". One quote from the blog:
> At other times it is weird — it does reflect the web after all.
I can see a lot of hackers wanting to try something like this and see if they can iteratively make it better and better and better.
Doesn't this sort of a site sound like something people here would love to toy with?
> For each query, Cpedia algorithmically summarizes and clusters the ideas on the web and uses this to generate a report. We do the heavy lifting of removing all the repetition, so that unique and novel content surfaces.
I personally think it's cool for people to try weird things like this-- even if the attempts fail.
I agree. While at the moment it's kind of cruddy in the current implementation, I gotta respect them for playing with what really is a fun idea. If they do manage to get it working better (extremely difficult and iffy), Cpedia could be a pretty cool tool.
"One cuil = one level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation." http://bit.ly/PHPAR
One cpedia = one level of unintentional comedy.
For example, if the content that cpedia collected into an article ends up being unintentionally humorous, that's 1 cpedia. If the arrangement/ordering of the content adds to the humor, that's 2 cpedias.
99 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadHere's one of the first grafs on "cuil" in cpedia:
Best Web Hosting Offer Cuil launches with an index of 120 billion web pages making it a most comprehensive magic! Affiliate Secrets search engine on the web and also a potential try to get the Google competitor. Clickbooth Cuil but not avail due to flooding traffics and making their servers 'too hot' to handle. After googling Cuil is down at the moment to 'cool' down.
http://cpedia.com/search?q=jeffrey+jenkins
What's really funny about this page is that a quick search reveals that the Milwaukee Brewers have a "Geoff Jenkins" and a "Jeffrey Hammond"
http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=computational+fluid+dynamics
http://cpedia.com/search?q=London%20Underground
Can anyone find something useful? I'd like to see a good article.
http://cpedia.com/search?q=sam+ruby
I've been trying to find just one good article, but so far, no luck.
http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=United+States+of+America
http://cpedia.com/search?q=ruby+on+rails
This is more nefarious than Mahalo. It's spam wrapped up in poorly summarised, chopped up content they have no right to be using.
And then the paragraph immediately after that doesn't follow at all. It starts:
>When he [Brian Mastenbrook] was able to reproduce the glitch at Basecamp, he began to suspect that the flaw was inherent to Ruby on Rails, the popular Web framework used by both websites.
Did they do QA before launching this thing?
>I find Cpedia best on topics that I thought I knew about. I find out things I should have known but didn’t. I’ve noticed productivity has slowed in the company since we have had it up for internal testing, as people ask each other about stranger and stranger trivia, or exclaim, “I didn’t know your middle name was Hector?”
I'm surprised they even released it; the few search terms I attempted generated useless results.
I just hope this garbage gets blacklisted in real search engines ASAP, before it starts polluting results.
In Dutch it's called 'plaatsvervangende schaamte' which literally means "place exchanging shame". Shame felt on behalf of someone else, shame you feel someone else should feel. I'm embarrassed for them.
Not really.
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/a5byc/interrobang_your...
Now, I am not going to try. Lesson learned.
Except, maybe, that mahalo's "content" is far better scraped.
I'm not sure what a crawler is supposed to conclude in that case.
I don't see a lot of cpedia content on Google yet. The only links I can see are clearly due to the threads here and on sites like Reddit.
It lets you in regardless of the username/password combination. I just logged in with this:
username: you morons
password: this defeats the whole damn purpose
I wonder if any of this gets logged at their end.
http://cpedia.com/search?q=techiferous
The results for my real name are disturbing: http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=wyatt+greene
This is probably a weakness, not a strength. If cuil were a bootstrapped one-person operation it would be very easy to cut the cord and move on to something else.
Or actually get it to work,like DuckDuckGo. One man operation. Impressive results. Contrasting DuckDuckGo and Cuil is enlightening in all kinds of ways.
Read literally, Paul Krill was the author of the entire article after the summary.
Because this content is pieced together by computers who have no idea of how the resulting piece reads as a whole, I wonder if there are hidden legal liabilities when words get stuffed into people's mouths or when the combinations of sections lead to false content (imagine one paragraph ending with "and found the following to be completely false:").
EDIT: Here's an article misquoting a lawyer. Not smart. ;) http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=palin#headline_31
the goal here isn't to find the one funny/stupid article...with this site the goal should be to find one article that actually makes sense
http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=Haskell&disambig=Functional...
And a search for Cheney does not show the former Vice President: http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=cheney
For a side experiment, I'm not going to fault or bash any company-- we've got a few of our own experiments which aren't the prettiest/best sites in the world.
> At other times it is weird — it does reflect the web after all.
I can see a lot of hackers wanting to try something like this and see if they can iteratively make it better and better and better.
Doesn't this sort of a site sound like something people here would love to toy with?
> For each query, Cpedia algorithmically summarizes and clusters the ideas on the web and uses this to generate a report. We do the heavy lifting of removing all the repetition, so that unique and novel content surfaces.
I personally think it's cool for people to try weird things like this-- even if the attempts fail.
The page for us is interesting. Huge amounts of content, flashes of brilliance, and moments of sheer terror. http://cpedia.com/search?q=wikispaces
http://twitpic.com/1ek18g/full
The moods could also relink this thread of conversation to the screen shot.
One cpedia = one level of unintentional comedy.
For example, if the content that cpedia collected into an article ends up being unintentionally humorous, that's 1 cpedia. If the arrangement/ordering of the content adds to the humor, that's 2 cpedias.