NELL (Never-Ending Language Learning) is a system developed at Carnegie Mellon which is taught to "learn" the web. I guess this is a successful project, something which I had worked on several years back with the idea that everything is related to everything else. Here is what they say about themselves:
Project Overview: To build a never-ending machine learning system that acquires the ability to extract structured information from unstructured web pages. If successful, this will result in a knowledge base (i.e., a relational database) of structured information that mirrors the content of the Web.
Their goal is to construct a knowledge base or relational data. I wonder what use it could be without a parser... Stay tuned, might be the next big thing.
You can also follow the machine twitter... @cmunell.