Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia
cuil.com
cuil.com
So my first inclination was dislike. But my second was more sympathy - this isn't a guy who is being an arrogant jerk, this is someone who is convinced that the hallmark work of his life thus far is quite good, criticisms be damned. I'm that stubborn sometimes. This is his biggest, and realistically, perhaps only shot at lasting greatness. He thought he was building the next great American technology company, and reality didn't measure up and he hasn't realized it.
So he points outwards - "they don't understand!" - but I don't dislike the guy. Who knows how long until he realizes what he's really got on his hands, and how he takes it. It'll surely be an unpleasant moment, punctuating a couple years of excitement followed by massive disappointment. I feel bad for him. I hope I never wind up there.
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.
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.
Google Squared attempts to be less ambitious and still feels very incomplete and they probably have some very smart people and the backing of the most complete index of the internet and probably the most computational power afforded to any work in the area.
Maybe even allow suggested snippets too - sort of like Wikipedia built from nothing but citations.
I was once part of a company that thought it had superior technology that everyone else "didn't understand." It was true, it had marvelous technology. It was also true that lots of people didn't understand it.
Here's what it also had: 1) a deployment system everyone agrees is a pain in the @@@, which they never paid much attention to, 2) user interfaces which didn't repaint themselves like native widgets and which looked terrible and had terrible APIs, 3) intermittent bugs the customers kept reporting and getting disregarded and blamed for, 4) a less than open, "not invented here" culture with a big dose of "us versus them."
It's cool to make an incremental advance. The hard part is getting people to understand it. The hard part is reaching your audience. For this, it's more productive to enlist their help, not to blame them.
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.
"A wise old owl sat in an oak \ The more he heard, the less he spoke \ The less he spoke, the more he heard \ Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird."
I imagine the working in the consumer web space - "bottom-feeding" - as he put it, is not his ideal career.
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.
"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?
Maybe if they changed it to: "Cpedia will almost always be wrong and nonsensical."
But then, why release it?
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."
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.
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 leaders an regions, but nothing about the countries themselves.)
http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=United%20States%20of%20America%20%2...
That shows all of the pages and seems to be more what you were looking for I would say :)
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".
Every paragraph in the resulting page was somehow related to my keyword. The only problem is that the paragraphs weren't very well connected. ;-) Of course, solving that would be a major AI breakthrough.
I've done several searches, some of the most disappointing were singular searches of pretty much any animal you could think of - returned nothing.
The search for "cow" is particularly bad, returning no entries for what you would expect (a cow), but 3/10 entries returned duplicate entries for cow dung.
I am almost certain even Steve Blank and Eric Reis would have advised them not to "go to market" so soon
Cpedia and Cuil might be their minimum product, but it is not anywhere near viable. They are a great example why CLOSED Alpha and Beta exist.
Edit: Their feedback section says "Feedback: Cpedia is the first of its kind on the web and we'd love to hear what you think. We promise we'll listen!"
That poem is more applicable to him. Maybe he did not realise his smart 6 year old was talking to him.
seriously though, he's trying to construct an argument around the necessity of bottom-feeding for information?
Things are usually only 'ahead of their time' if you ignore a lot of the implementation and operational details. For example, Vannevar Bush's famous Memex, always cited as the important precursor to hypertext, was flatly unworkable: A desk-sized machine built around microfilm? It makes as much sense to talk about Jules Verne as the father of manned spaceflight because he thought of firing men from cannons.
My point is that being the first to an idea is rarely the important thing. Being first to a good, solid implementation is what counts.
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.
If I was trying to get funding for cpedia, I'd want to know which VCs get drunk easily...
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.
In other words, it's a useful tool for an unsightly and messy process. In other words, it is the last thing you'd want to expose to the web at large.
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'.
well i think the result is excellent
I'm from Ireland, have played hurling for about 21 years, this is the first time I have ever heard of this! Cuil finally taught me something, it only took them 2 years! Granted I never use their service...and there are many things I don't know.
Now, how about explaining this for those poor benighted souls who speak English?
Hurling is a popular native ball sport in Ireland which involves two teams playing against each other with sticks called hurleys and a ball called a sliothar. Think of it as ice hockey without ice / skates and the sliothar instead of a puck. A wee bit of violence and tribalism are also as big part of the game, as in ice hockey...
Plus I do agree with one of the comments above that the poem should apply to him. One thing I have learned from being in business a long time, its that negative feedback is gold, if you use it to turn a situation around to leave your customer with the feeling that they have been heard, been paid attention to and taken care of. That kind of customer will stick around more than a customer who used your product and it just worked fine. I love to deal with problem customers, as it is an opportunity, not a chore, if handled correctly.
Excuses are a dime a dozen, especially when it comes to cutting edge tech.
Sorry to say it, but it's true. It will be a huge waste of money and engineer manhours that would likely be better spent if they were working on web-based clones of minesweeper, with server clusters dedicated to 2-play minesweeper MADNESS.
This, THIS is how idiotic Cuil is.