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Map of Web Content By Perspective

Posted by timothy on Sat Oct 11, 2008 02:23 PM
from the imperfect-but-neat dept.
The Internet The Media
An anonymous reader writes "Cruxlux has a perspective-based search engine up. It provides a map of results laid out by viewpoint. For example, querying 'Obama' shows a map with liberal blog posts, articles, and video clumped together, conservative stuff nearby, and nonpolitical sources farther away. It works for nonpolitical queries too (sports, etc.). It also lets you limit results to certain types of views — you can focus on hot 'Obama' content from a liberal angle, for instance."
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Submission: Map of web content by perspective by Anonymous Coward
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  • RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Exanon (1277926) on Saturday October 11 2008, @02:28PM (#25341129)
    It's interesting to see that when you type in "RIAA" almost all content range from blogs that report on the RIAA's losses, to the one that report on how much they hate the RIAA.

    They really have no friends anymore.

  • Now we have another tool to isolate people in their echo chambers!

    • Re:Great... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by guha_cruxlux (1383127) on Saturday October 11 2008, @02:42PM (#25341203)
      Hi, I'm one of the two guys who built Cruxlux. Yes, you could use it to isolate in your echo chamber, but really one of our hopes is that it can help break those walls down. If you don't specify a site, it will show you a cloud of all content, so you can see all angles on the story at a single view, not just one. Also, there's a debate platform there you might fine interesting.

      • Re:Great... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11 2008, @03:29PM (#25341439)

        Also, there's a debate platform there you might fine interesting.

        Excellent, there's no better way to break the internet feedback loop than by encouraging debate. People will bring their best rational arguments and exchange opinions in a frank, lucid manner. It's genius!

      • Re:Great... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Alsee (515537) on Saturday October 11 2008, @05:19PM (#25341981) Homepage

        I just tested the site with a search on "trusted computing". I tried it both with and without quotes. I was rather puzzled to see results featuring the Sarah Palin scandal and nationalreview ranting "Don't trust the liberal media". I was only able to search through part of the results before the site froze up - Slashdot effect I assume - but I couldn't find a single result actually addressing Trusted Computing. As near as I can tell it simply targeted the 'trust' fragment of the search term.

        -

      • You need more data. And less liebrul bias. Man, I tried searching "Sarah" in sites like sex.com. Your site's response?

        "Thanks for the new information
        Our system didn't know about sex.com before. Thank you for feeding us a new site. "

        If you can't place Sarah in sex.com context, man, what good is your site fer?

  • 'Obama' content from a liberal angle (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Also known as a progressive upskirt.

  • yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by owlnation (858981) on Saturday October 11 2008, @02:42PM (#25341207)
    I like the concept, it certainly has its uses. And it's long before time that search had new innovations, for something so intrinsically useful and lucrative, there's been almost no progress in search in a decade.

    However, these folks need to hire a graphic designer. That is one ugly, cluttered website. Far, far too much information to look at at one time, daunting to say the least. Google had the right idea with their interface. Less is more.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by guha_cruxlux (1383127)
      Definitely can be improved! We have some UI changes in the works, and welcome any specific suggestions you might have too. We hope to get feedback on what you find useful and not, and are pretty confident you'll find the site experience improving over coming weeks as we work them in...
      There's a fine balance between showing a lot of information at once, yet keeping it digestible.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by guha_cruxlux (1383127)
        glad you like the concept by the way. We'll have some neat extensions on it coming out soon.

      • Re:yes, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by blackest_k (761565) on Saturday October 11 2008, @03:51PM (#25341549) Homepage Journal

        it seems to do quite well for results but the interface is terrible on a small screen. useless crap on the page when i am trying to look at the results. I don't
        mind having to scroll up and down to see more results currently its like trying to look at a room through a letterbox. the results window needs to be bigger.
        I don't mind the additions and suggestions dotted round the side before i search after they need to be moved or removed underneath would be ok.

        I also couldn't find a way to open the results it would be preferable to open a link to the actual page in fact open several pages even.

        The colors had no meaning to me I need to know what i am looking at.
        if the colors classify the results as type e.g blogs forums wiki commercial vendor ect. i'd like a key to the colors.

        biggest issue really was being unable to get at the results in any useful way.

        one part sentence seemed to be all i could see.

        on the otherhand the core idea looks good.

        A pet hate of mine with google is the inability to seperate a search for a product from a search for information about a product also no way to filter out all the agregation sites which just say you can buy x here here and here and often x is y and not what i am looking for.

        search is promising , results awful.

  • My impressions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Compuser (14899) on Saturday October 11 2008, @02:43PM (#25341213)

    Terrible, hard to type name.
    Messy interface. Yellow color scheme?
    Small snippets to represent blogs (And I mean small visually, not small number of words).

    The inset window blocks much of the search panel.

    As far as I can tell, no attempt to group results by domain, that is stacking several relevant blog postings from same blog in adjoint rectangles.

    Grade: F-

  • Good start (Score:5, Funny)

    by dexmachina (1341273) on Saturday October 11 2008, @03:05PM (#25341345)
    That might be useful for around 1% of internet searches. Now you just need to design a feature that cleverly organizes porn to deal with the other 99%.

  • very young service (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jesse Rudolph (1374337) on Saturday October 11 2008, @03:13PM (#25341373) Homepage

    I guess if you are searching for political/sports information its fine, as that seems to be the only types of blogs in the database. If you search for 'camping' for instance, there's almost no content about camping, and almost everything but a few items in the map are of a political nature. Interesting idea, but only of minimal use to anyone interested in anything other than sports or politics... for the moment anyhow.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by guha_cruxlux (1383127)
      That's an accurate statement. Because we have limited storage, we're only storing our web index going back 14 days (for the most part), making it ideal at the moment only for current topics in the news (not necessarily politics), either getting for an overview of all angles, or finding neat content from the type of site you like.

      If there were a current scandal with camping, it might be different!

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by izomiac (815208)
      It doesn't seem to be just politics/sports, but I haven't had much success with getting it to accurately clump other things.

      C++: Failed to get any results (mostly a test to see if "++" threw it off)
      Perl: Expected: love it/hate it type clumping; Got: News articles mentioning perl, Ubuntu news, and lots of unclumped results
      Anime: Expected: love it/hate it and blogs about the new series (i.e. current news); Got: Mostly unclumped "animal" type articles
      Haiku: Expected: a couple articles about poetry, some
  • I searched for Israel, and got a lot of multicolored, evenly spaced boxes(without any indication for what a particular color means). there were almost no clumps, which is strange since I'd expect radically different views to be expressed.

    It's also weird that they included uncyclopedia as a source. it would be fine in a normal search engine, but here the results seem to come from newspapers and blogs.

    • Re:not sure how well it works (Score:4, Insightful)

      by johnlcallaway (165670) on Saturday October 11 2008, @03:35PM (#25341477)

      Without a guide about what the viewpoint is, I didn't find much use in it.

      Search on Cruxlux for 'Obama McCain global warming' [cruxlux.com] and you get a hodgepodge of data back, with no indication what, if any, is relevant and having to dig to find anything that compares the two.

      While Google [google.com] returned a very concise list of items on the first two pages.

      Sorry Cruxlux ... not convinced I should stop using Google.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by guha_cruxlux (1383127)
        This isn't intended as a general purpose search engine to compete with Google, but more to get a spread of online content about any current topic.

        You might find it useful as a launching point to seeing all the different angles in one shot, which a standard search won't give you, or to get a nice spread of video and articles from a particular type of source, which again standard search isn't built for.

        As for a guide on what view each cluster represents when you don't target the search -- right now, it wo

        • I'm sorry .. I didn't phrase my post well.

          I did a search for opinions about something, and Google was far superior.

          I won't be back to your site, it does not have any apparent benefits over the sites I'm using now, and in fact was far less useful. I do not wish to waste time trying to find usefulness in it.

          Read what I did again and figure out how to give me what I want if you want me to use your site.

          Unless my personal usage of your site doesn't matter. That's fair, in it's current form, your site doesn't ma

    • seems to be working better on things that are immediately contentious in the news today, such as North Korea's being taken o ff the terror blacklist.

  • Great... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ... now it has become even more easy to stick one's head in the sand, or up one's own arse depending on preference, than it already was.

  • I was wondering where I was going to get my "hot Obama content from a liberal angle"!

    • Ha, Perhaps not the best example someone could have given! But you can also use it to see both sides on that, or the different angles on any other story in the news.

  • Not just spam... trolling spam (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jlarocco (851450) on Saturday October 11 2008, @03:42PM (#25341503) Homepage

    This has to be a new low for Slashdot.

    The evidence this is spam/slashvertisement:

    • The "Anonymous Coward" link goes to: http://cs.stanford.edu/~ [stanford.edu] guhaj
    • Meanwhile, "guha_cruxlux", a supposed developer of cruxlux.com, is replying to comments defending the site.
    • "guha_cruxlux" has a slashdot ID of 1383127, meaning he's had an account for all of about 10 minutes.

    And if being obvious spam/slashvertisement weren't bad enough, the summary is basically a giant Obama/McCain troll.

    But hey, they managed to keep spelling and grammar mistakes to a minimum, so I guess that's something.

  • I have been looking at this site for a few months and have seen some great changes. They are constantly changing the site, improving it and adding new features. I think the technology they have built has a lot of potential. Keep it up!
  • When a search for "php" does not list php.net http://www.cruxlux.com/q/php [cruxlux.com] I find it hard to believe in their technology.
  • I'd comment but it's been slashdotted it seems.

  • ...comes up as a ... well, a blank page.

    Take that for what it's worth.

  • Try doing a query other than one of the ones they suggest. Pick something you're particularly interested in or know a lot about. You'll see this thing does pretty much nothing useful.

  • Ehm, that UI is a joke, right?
    I mean, otherwise it looks like someone tried really, really hard here - and failed completely.

  • One Suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AmberBlackCat (829689) on Saturday October 11 2008, @07:38PM (#25342691) Homepage
    Don't let your site's first impression be a giant popup window that makes them unable to type a search term until they click on "close slideshow".
  • No offense to the creators of this site, but that's just about the worst user interface I've seen (OK, so maybe there's a little offense in there).

    The intuitiveness of "Look what I can do with JavaScript!" Web 2.0 design principles, married to the visual aesthetic of circa 1993 "My cat's Homepage"-type sites.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Please RTFA and then apologize.

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I apologize

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by TheSHAD0W (258774)

      You know, I just realized that before the main content was loaded the page flashed "WE CAN SOLVE THE ULTIMATE CRISIS".

      Yeah, this article - and the site - may just be a teeny bit slanted.

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So sorry to hear about your dead brain.

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