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Wait a second - Yahoo! couldn't figure out how to algorithmically shorten a long-form story for display on mobile? It took a 17-year old and $30M to make this h

• Houshalter 14y ago
  It's hardly a simple problem. And by buying out another successful company they get the consumer base it already has rather than spending resources and pushing their own product and risk having it fail or having to compete with the other company.
  • yen223 14y ago
    But is it really a $30,000,000 problem?
    • smartwater 14y ago
      It could be. A substantial amount of time and effort is required to even start to answer that question.
    • Houshalter 14y ago
      Do you mean is it worth $30 million or do you mean does it cost that much? I don't know the economics behind it but I imagine if there were enough consumers using it, it could conceivably be worth that much. As far as taking that much to build a system like that, definitely. It's a natural language problem. The computer not only has to process natural language, which is a hard enough problem on it's own, but then decide what parts are "important" or not. And then this has to be scaled up to process hundreds or thousands of articles simultaneously, each within a few seconds or less.
• swah 14y ago
  I had that idea jotted down a few years ago, but no idea how to implement such a thing with robustness in relation to the several formats of articles you may find...