General News of Monday, 24 July 2017
Source: Graphic.com.gh
2017-07-24
The story of Mudclo has gone viral and some think it will challenge google
A section of the Ghanaian software developer community is up in arms against the Mudclo creator, Gabriel Opare for touting his software as a search engine likely to rival google.
The story of Mudclo has gone viral and some think the creation of the level 300 sociology student of the University of Ghana will challenge the dominance google.
However, two of Opare’s critics Kwamina Eyiah Arthur and Claude Ayitey argue that Mudclo is a search website that has erroneously been hailed as a search engine.
Ayitey argues that Mudclo is basically an amalgamation of Application Programming Interface (API) into one website.
“So what Mudclo basically does it presents search results from all the video search engines, and then puts all of them in one place. For example, if you want a OnePlus 5 video, it will bring all the videos together, from different providers, and present them to you. Mtchew, this is even some publicity for him,” Ayitey wrote in a post on Gharage.com.
“Just as absurd as it is for someone to say they can prepare a meal just because they have been to several 5-star restaurants, that’s the same absurdity and erroneous information this website presents.
“I find it insulting that amidst all the several fraudulent exposes of software hypocrisies, someone who just comes up with a website because he knows APIs can come to say they are building an app that will rival YouTube. Yea, it’s good to build stuff but don’t go out there claiming to be what you’re not. That is fraud!”.
Kwamina Eyiah Arthur in a similar post on afd-techtalk.com argues that Opare, a level 300 sociology student of the University of Ghana, may have combined already existing API’s of Vimeo, YouTube and Daily Motion for his creation.
“…Mudclo is basically a video metasearch website. How Mudclo works is that, when you search for a video on the website, it shows you results from Vimeo, YouTube and Daily Motion — quite convenient, right? Instead of visiting 3 websites, you only visit one and you get similar results.
“Coming up with a metasearch website, in relation to building a search engine, does not involve a lot of work at all, to be honest: you just mash up a couple of already existing APIs and that’s it, you have your website. Chances are, you’d probably not need to write one line of code — you just use templates and everything is set up for you”.
Arthur also blamed the Ghanaian media for exaggerating and misrepresenting the story in several publications.
The Mudclo website – www.mudclo.com – is currently down for “security reasons”.
