[WikiEN-l] robotically generated content

[David Gerard]

On 17 April 2010 01:05, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> That is a fair and thoughtful indictment of their approach. I have no
> particular problem with the other comments in this thread either --
> they weren't all substantial criticism, but that's fine as far as it
> goes. A lot of other reactions, however, could be boiled down to "You
> poopy head idiots!" or some slight variation. The simple truth is that
> most business fail, and few attempts at innovation penetrate into
> general popularity. Yet we should, and often do, encourage innovation
> and entrepreneurial efforts because - even when they fail - such
> efforts contribute to their field. Remarks that insult the people
> behind Cpedia and Cuil as stupid or senseless can't be taken
> seriously, and they deserve the Cuil CEO's disdain.


I'd call your attention to the last comment on the CEO's post:
pointing out that what they've done here is create a search-engine
spam engine. The only way to monetise this thing would be to put
bottom-feeding ads all over it in the hope of attracting search terms.

And the Cuil search engine is still the shining example of why Cuil
Theory exists. It's comically awful and is most useful to point the
kids at and tell them "Google got popular by not sucking like that."

It is true that failure is important to future success; but one very
important thing about failure, particularly large and spectacular
failure is that it is - in fact - failure.


- d.