Behind the Scenes at News Aggregator Topix.Net: "In 1998 we did a project called NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscape/AOL, and is now called the Open Directory Project (ODP). It used a massive group of volunteers to build the web's largest human-edited directory. The ODP now has 60,000 volunteer editors, and the data powers Google Directory.
Our team left Netscape/AOL in 2002, and rather than using human labor again, we wanted to explore emerging AI (artificial intelligence) techniques for classifying and extracting structured data from the web. The goal for Topix.net is to make a web page about everything -- every person, place, and thing in the world -- constantly machine-summarized from the Internet." Topix.net
# Apr 14, 2004