Can the Entire Internet be Summarized?

What’s the Latest Development?

16 year-old Nick D’Aloisio has gathered a quarter million dollars toward condensing the content of every webpage on the Internet into 1,000, 500, or 140-character summaries. The app, called Summly, is “a text auto summarizer designed to fit all those things you’re reading on a mobile device into concise synopses and share those over SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter in .txt form—all with a few clicks.” By offering a simpler browsing and searching experience, the app attempts to solve the problem of content overload on the Internet.

What’s the Big Idea?

The app uses an AI-based tool that attempts to mimic evolution, according to D’Aloisio. “Summly’s algorithm is able to instantly analyze text and automatically distill it into digestible chunks, doing so as you browse and surf the Web, providing succinct summaries of search results, articles, and Web pages.” So far, the technology seems promising. When MIT researchers tested the app, the found that it outperforms the ‘highest academically published results’ by a factor of 30 percent.

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