Boxxet, a Tool for Automatic Webpage Generation

tkajstura writes "New Scientist is reporting on 'a new tool [called Boxxet that] offers to create websites on any subject, allowing web surfers to sit back, relax and watch a virtual space automatically fill up with relevant news stories, blog posts, maps and photos.' It uses an algorithm based on unique word count to filter an index and integrate relevant subject information into the page, called a 'Boxxet.' The tool will first be available by invitation only, opening to the general public by the end of April 2006."

Comments

Unique word count algorithm?

[nganju]

How long until someone (i.e. everyone) figures out how to fool the algorithm and exploit the system so that their blog posts show up every single day on the front page of the "Boxxet"? Unique word count has got to be the most naive algorithm out there. Remember in the nineties when every web page had a list of three thousand keywords at the very bottom of the page to fool the search engines of the time?

Just great

[BertieBaggio]

This kind of tool might be nice for those people that are to lazy to either blog themselves or do some honest-to-god surfing, but can you really see publishers being thrilled that their content is going to be diluted and published on some Joe Q Random's Boxxet page?

Now, some bloggers and others might be happy to be republished verbatim outwith their control. That's fine. But most professional webmasters have a name for bots that go around taking content and putting it on other sites without permission*. The are called scrapers . The Boxxet bot and others like it are and will be banned by many webmasters (including myself) because the potential for abuse is too high.

There is also a name for such sites automatically produced by scrapers -- made for AdSense

* Note: There is no problem with sites that take headlines, write a summary/teaser and link back (like a certain site we are all very familiar with). These sites are doing a Good Thing(TM) for the content creators -- sending them an interested [ie targeted] audience. The problem for both the publishers and the search engines is the scraping. Only time will tell whether Boxxet is one of the troublemakers (cause the article and the site sure don't give many clues).