Map of Web Content By Perspective

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."

Comments

Re:Great...

[guha_cruxlux]

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.

My impressions

[Compuser]

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-

Re:yes, but...

[guha_cruxlux]

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.

not sure how well it works

[proind]

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.

Great...

[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.

Not just spam... trolling spam

[jlarocco]

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/~ 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.

Re:yes, but...

[blackest_k]

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.

Re:very young service

[izomiac]

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 about the OS, mostly a test of sorting ability and database size; Got: A few relevant results, but no useful clumping

So, yeah. A neat idea, but not terribly useful for stuff other than politics/sports right now. Or perhaps it's been tweaked for mainstream stuff.

Re:Great...

[Alsee]

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.

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