Cpedia

I first looked at Cpedia a week or so back, thought it was a bit of a trainwreck and moved on. (You've got no idea how much stuff I actually look at and decide not to inflict on you!) However, I came back and revisited it due to a link to the blog entry of Tom Costello, CEO of Cuil (which you may remember from a year or so back), in which he's less than happy with the 'haters' who have said nasty things about the product.

He's used a slightly odd approach to defend his product, Cpedia, which is an attempt to create an automated encyclopedia by dragging content from a variety of different resources and jigsawing it together, apparently has errors that are intentional. This is because of 'bottom feeding' would you believe, in that Cpedia goes where other search engines fear to tread, and there's a reason why they don't - because the further down the results you go, the less useful they're going to be. 

My jaw did drop a little bit at his example though - he boasts 'I was able to discover that he (a VC he was meeting) has a tendency to over-imbibe.' This is his one redeeming feature according to Mr Costello. (Honestly, I'm not making this up - it's in the blog posting.) The promise of Cpedia is that you will find information that you might otherwise miss. So let's take a look at it.

I started with a search for Everton. Cpedia culled content from 6,624 pages. It's total gibberish! There's a contents listing (as Wikipedia has) and it starts with a player, which is a damn funny place to start. Then there are subsections about other players, other teams, things that have nothing to do with the club. Then there's a section 'According to Sky Sports'. Here, don't take my word for it - take a look. Sorry it's long, but it's worth it.

Have you ever seen anything quite that insane? It doesn't get any better when you start reading, because sentences are just jammed together in no apparent order at all - to the point of being unreadable. In case you think it's just a problem with that one article, I looked at Web 2.0, librarians, and Cuil. I did try and search for 'Internet' and was told there was no Cpedia page for internet.

That just about says it all really. Do take a look, both at the ranty blog (and don't miss out on the comments, some of them are most amusing) and spend a couple of minutes with Cpedia itself. Just be careful of your jaw though, since I wouldn't want it to drop so far as to hit the desk and hurt you!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cpedia Founder Says Errors Are "Intentional" (gigaom.com)