Cuil Relaunches as An Automated Encylopedia: Cpedia

[engine]

Cuil is trying again with a relaunch of an automated encylopedia: cpedia (alpha)

Find 384,165,027 automated articles

[cpedia.com...]

[man in poland]

This should have been launched on 1st April - what a joke.

[StoutFiles]

It's a lesser version of Wikipedia, and it's the same horrible layout as Cuil. Sigh.

[man in poland]

Stoutfiles - you are too forgiving.

Try actually searching for something, like your name. The results are pure gibberish. There's no grammar whatsoever. Headings bear no relationship to the content. It's a non-stop barrage of non sequitors.

Shall I go on?

[jmccormac]

Agggggggh my eyes! The only thing that Cuil is doing is automating stupidity.

Regards...jmcc

[caribguy]

It‘s an encyclopedia for all the stuff that can‘t get into encyclopedias.

But why? There's enough diarrhea on the web as it is... And what's with the backticks?

[mcavic]

It might have some value as an experiment. The results I saw were not exactly coherent, but not gibberish either. It's definitely an alpha project though, which personally I wouldn't have released.

That being said:

Agggggggh my eyes!

That sums up my thoughts on Cuil.

[maximillianos]

Holy scraper spam batman.

I did a few searches and got what appears to be "automated" scraped content pieced together gibberish.

Is this why the cuil bot has been hitting my site a lot harder lately?

[httpwebwitch]

What an absolute pile of rubbish.
Their encyclopaedia entries are random sentences scraped from other sources, shuffled together like a pack of cards. Completely unrelated sentences, one after another, and the only thing they have in common is the presence of the queried key phrase.

It's a non-stop barrage of non sequiturs

my thoughts exactly

[httpwebwitch]

1) do a cpedia search for "batman"
2) see that they found many different meanings of batman, some of which are not different
3) click on the first one, "batman"
4) goto 2

[StoutFiles]

1) do a cpedia search for "batman"
2) see that they found many different meanings of batman, some of which are not different
3) click on the first one, "batman"
4) goto 2

I threw up a little in my mouth trying to decipher the results for Batman Returns, which according to Cpedia includes such characters as Heath Ledger and Edward Scissorhands.

Content from 4,378 webpages curated by Cpedia, the automated encyclopedia.

Curate(v) - To organize and oversee. Cuil, the word you're looking for is "blended" or "mashed".

[jmccormac]

Cpedia - because the domain with the 'ra' was taken. :)

Regards...jmcc

[UserFriendly]

This is the opener for "lossless audio":

"Now we hear that the fatboy gone slim supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream output to your receiver. Is there a sound card to get lossless audio from the pc, such as DTS-MA or TrueHD from Blu-rays?"

This not only makes no sense, but it also gives the appearance of having been lifted from one or more articles on other people's sites.

How long before a webmaster spots a chunk of his content on this dire "automatic encyclopedia" and takes legal action?

(I'm checking my keywords on cpedia very carefully right now.)

[jmccormac]

I banned them in robots.txt recently but their maggots ignored it and kept right on trying to download pages. They've been permanently 403ed. Crapedia is such a mess that it makes its efforts with Cuil look slightly competent.

Regards...jmcc

[Zamboni]

I pity the poor fool who stumbles on this and thinks the results are factual.


Maybe it was an April fools joke and nobody seen it until now.

[driller41]

proudly displayed on the top of the page.

"Content from 4,197 webpages curated by Cpedia, the automated encyclopedia."

This cant be good.

[maximillianos]

This actually helps me. I was torn about blocking their bot, since they were attempting to be a legit search engine.

Now they are just a scraper site with no back links to sources. Time to block.

[brotherhood of LAN]

What on earth are they thinking?

[timster]

It amazes me how much worse cpedia is than their first effort (cuil.com). Cuil had potential, with that fancy semantic analysis, it could grow up into something really useful one day. Cpedia reads like a worthless MFA scraper site.

[piatkow]

I spotted information which was scraped from a site that was taken down over a year ago and had been dormant for a couple of years before that. The lack of links means that the user could never identify that it was totally out of date.

I maintain the site that replaced it but they don't seem to have discovered that at all.

[BillyS]

I cannot imagine how complicated this would have to be to actually work. Maybe they see this as the future of Search and they're just going for patent rights...

[ChanandlerBong]

there is one group of people who will use this "service"...those wanting random text for their spam e-mails.

I'm sure there's a forum for people like that and they're probably all there today clapping their hands and smiling broadly.

[iambic9]

Yikes! This is just plain weird, I can't quite work out how some of those paragraphs have been assembled, the grammar is slightly odd (to be polite), and the content itself –quite often– does not make sense, thus rendering it useless as an encyclopaedia.

Scrape and lash enough content together and you will inevitably end up with something, well done for doing that I suppose.

They didn't need to release a weird alpha to secure patent rights...

[iambic9]

...those wanting random text for their spam e-mails.

Ha! This reminds me of a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters.

[physics]

I'm pretty sure this is called a scraper site. Good work on that cuil.

[pageoneresults]

Google, Yahoo! and Bing. On behalf of the Webmaster Community, please nuke this entire venture from your indices. I've seen crap before and this surely epitomizes that term. I performed 5 different searches, all of them return absolute rubbish and irrelevant linked references. I've seen scrapers without a brand name do better than this.

<title>Cuil - The World's Biggest Search Engine</title>

By the way cuil, isn't the above false advertising? And, why does your home page title still say that?

[edited by: pageoneresults at 4:23 pm (utc) on Apr 13, 2010]

[jrap]

It looks like they just created a highly advanced scraping site hah! The concept is interesting, but they really shouldn't have made this public so early. The results are pure garbage. Maybe in a years time they will have something usable.

[mack]

This is without a doubt the most ill conceived idea I have ever seen. If nothing else its good for a laugh when you search for yourself.

Mack.

[physics]

Title needs changing to

<title>Cuil - The World's Biggest Scraper Site</title>

[jmccormac]

Must be the only startup where the burnrate applied to the IQs of those involved. They just don't understand the concept of search quality.

Regards...jmcc