Scary-Cool Data Mining

Eliyon provides an interesting service to search people. They scrape information of the web and newsgroups and builds profiles of people. There seem to be some limitations. When you search for Larry Wall, it comes up with 98 results (of which 20 are displayed) supposedly corresponding to 98 different Larry Walls, which is clearly not true. At least three of the first twenty profiles belong to Larry, and they should be combined into one. However, it is understandable since this is done programmatically.

In spite of this limitation, it is very cool and, as Simon put it, scary.

(via Simon Cozens)