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Why phrase it as a question? The linked article is a PR piece that obviously argues that Ontolo is the fastest crawler, parser, indexer. The actual article tit

Why phrase it as a question? The linked article is a PR piece that obviously argues that Ontolo is the fastest crawler, parser, indexer. The actual article title "400,000,000+ Prospects a Day: Behind the Scenes of ontolo" seems less click baity.

joekrill 10y ago
I didn't even bother clicking through because I saw the domain name (ontolo.com) and assumed it was a PR piece. Also, Betteridge's law of headlines gave me my answer already (spoiler: it's "no").
- benwills 10y ago
  Hi Joe. I just saw this post here on HN. I'm the sole author of ontolo. Your comment about the ontolo domain and assuming it was a PR piece, is that because you know of ontolo as a marketing tool, or because it wasn't a more generalized site like Medium? Also, if you know of any other crawlers, etc, that are faster than ontolo (in the public domain, or public claims), let me know. There aren't a lot of folks I know who are working on this sort of thing and not also working at search engines. It'd be neat to meet some other folks who are interested in the problem.
  - joekrill 10y ago
    Hey Ben. It's because it was immediately apparent it would be a totally biased piece. When companies write about their own products, they usually do so from a completely biased perspective, in their favor, because they want whoever is reading it to favor their product. Microsoft.com isn't going to feature an article proclaiming OSX is the better operating system, for example -- so anything comparing the two on that site is going to be heavily biased towards Windows. If I'm looking for something that's actually informative, whatever I find there isn't going to be much use to me.
    - benwills 10y ago
      That makes sense. I don't know if this factors in, but I didn't post the link here. And if I ever did post a link here to ontolo, the HN post title would be very different. And I agree that few, if any, folks that talk about their own stuff are able to do so objectively.

joekrill 10y ago

I didn't even bother clicking through because I saw the domain name (ontolo.com) and assumed it was a PR piece. Also, Betteridge's law of headlines gave me my answer already (spoiler: it's "no").

benwills 10y ago
Hi Joe. I just saw this post here on HN. I'm the sole author of ontolo. Your comment about the ontolo domain and assuming it was a PR piece, is that because you know of ontolo as a marketing tool, or because it wasn't a more generalized site like Medium? Also, if you know of any other crawlers, etc, that are faster than ontolo (in the public domain, or public claims), let me know. There aren't a lot of folks I know who are working on this sort of thing and not also working at search engines. It'd be neat to meet some other folks who are interested in the problem.
- joekrill 10y ago
  Hey Ben. It's because it was immediately apparent it would be a totally biased piece. When companies write about their own products, they usually do so from a completely biased perspective, in their favor, because they want whoever is reading it to favor their product. Microsoft.com isn't going to feature an article proclaiming OSX is the better operating system, for example -- so anything comparing the two on that site is going to be heavily biased towards Windows. If I'm looking for something that's actually informative, whatever I find there isn't going to be much use to me.
  - benwills 10y ago
    That makes sense. I don't know if this factors in, but I didn't post the link here. And if I ever did post a link here to ontolo, the HN post title would be very different. And I agree that few, if any, folks that talk about their own stuff are able to do so objectively.