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.
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.
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.