But users don't care about technology, they care about getting something useful - and the few times I used it the results were almost laughably bad.
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.