I think it may be the format the result is presented in. It acts as if it can give the world then gives very little. If they were upfront about the level it is at by making the design more about listing pieces of information rather than trying to assume they all mesh together nicely they may get better reviews.
How it's presented is a huge part of why people reacted so negatively. They present the articles as prose, so people expect it to flow like prose. This makes them very sensitive to disorganization.
I think they're deserving of the criticism they've received. Cpedia is an interesting idea, and I assume they've done a lot of really good work we're not grasping. But it's not ready for public consumption yet, and they shouldn't have pretended it was.
They were over-zealous. It happens. What's important is how they move ahead. I'm with wheels on this one. We shouldn't write them off yet.
No doubt it's a huge problem area, been researching around areas that would be involved in this like clustering and summarization,
Google Squared attempts to be less ambitious and still feels very incomplete and they probably have some very smart people and the backing of the most complete index of the internet and probably the most computational power afforded to any work in the area.
It might work better if they just presented a list of results, and users could up/down vote the results for relevancy. Overtime they could use that feedback to float more relevant "snippets" to the top. Kinda like wikipedia but without all the hassle of typing.
How about using mouse tracking like the page analytics guys do. What people are hovering their mouse over is what their reading ... and that constitutes a "vote".
