Could IBM's Watson Put Google In Jeopardy? 274
theodp writes "Over at Wired, Vashant Dhar poses a provocative question: What If IBM's Watson Dethroned the King of Search? 'If IBM did search,' Dhar writes, 'Watson would do much better than Google on the tough problems and they could still resort to a simple PageRank-like algorithm as a last resort. Which means there would be no reason for anyone to start their searches on Google. All the search traffic that makes Google seemingly invincible now could begin to shrink over time.' Mixing supercomputers with a scalable architecture of massive amounts of simple processors and storage, Dhar surmises, would provide a formidable combination of a machine that can remember, know, and think. And because the costs of switching from Google search would not be prohibitive for most, the company is much more vulnerable to disruption. 'The only question,' Dhar concludes, 'is whether it [IBM] wants to try and dethrone Google from its perch. That's one answer Watson can't provide.'"
References? (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is, that Google does not tell the answer. It just gives you a link to the answer. So if the answer is wrong, you cannot blame Google.
What about Watson?
Vajk
ps: also the last thing I would say about pagerank is being simple
Silly question (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course not. It's an IBM machine, they'll sell Google as many as Google wants to buy. Of course, so can Microsoft but they don't have a good track record at all.
I wish Google did have a Watson. This morning I asked my Android "where can I buy a good pair of fur-lined leather gloves" and it thought I said "where can I buy a good pair of for lined leather gloves" and returned no useful results at all. The programmer was a southerner, I guess? "How much does them go fer?"
Amazing what it does get right, but Google, buy a few Watsons!
Better searches no good if they're too slow (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about the engine (Score:2, Insightful)
The database is much more important than the engine, and IBM can't compete with Google on that one.
Sick of 'smart' searches (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm getting a bit sick of 'smart' searches... or, rather, not being able to disable the 'smartness.' More often than not, I really don't want a search engine making assumptions about what I meant, rather than just taking what I enter completely literally, and I *never* want it to insert results that don't contain all of my search terms because it scored exponentially better with the other items in the query. Chances are, I added in the term they were ignoring, specifically, to drastically reduce the number of results I got, because I wanted to *narrow it down*.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I would rather tweak the search to narrow down crap results than try to outsmart the 'smartness' any day of the week. I understand that this isn't necessarily what John Q. Internetuser is looking for in search, but at least having the option there would be a big help. Google used to have a very straightforward syntax to help you modify your search results in specific, predictable ways... while much of that syntax is still valid in google searches, now it seems like everything can be arbitrarily overridden by what google thinks you 'should' have meant, rather than what you told it you meant. Very frustrating.
You don't understand Google (Score:5, Insightful)
This betrays a very basic misunderstaning about how Google got where it is, and how it stays there.
Yes, pagerank is a great idea, and it was perhaps an improvement over what was being done before. But that wasn't why people abandoned the likes of Lycos and Yahoo(!) for Google back in the late 90's. Back then all the other search engines had gone to practices that were quite frankly user-abusive. Adds were placed all over the place, including an indeterminate amount of the top hits on your search. The search screens themselves also existed mostly to pump ads at you, and were really clunky, with a large amount of confusing options right there on the main search page.
Google, by contrast, had a main search page with no options whatsoever. Just a text box and a couple of buttons. "Breath of fresh air" doesn't even begin to describe how wonderful to use this was compared to what we were used to. On top of that, the search results were clearly delineated from the ads, so you could trust the results. The "don't be evil" motto was obviously infused into the whole effort. Every competitor was just a giagantic pain to use by comparison. "Page rank" or whatever wifty algorithim used for all this was something that nobody but extreme techies (and marketers) really ever gave a crap about.
So if you've got something that you think competes with Google, you'd better be talking about how nice and clean the interface is by comparison, how much easier it is to find real results without having to wade around ads, and how trustworthy the provider is wrt not allowing marketing weasels to buy their way into my search results. If you aren't talking about any of that, frankly nobody gives a crap.
Re:Google, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course Watson will be able to do this.
Obviously, Dhar did a bunch of research, and determined that even though it took a massively powerful computer to answer one question at a time that has a predetermined single answer, over several seconds, it can trivially scale to support millions of simultaneous queries, which may have zero, one or multiple answers.
Re:References? (Score:4, Insightful)
Save for that fact that it makes sense. It is based on water a common material we are all familiar with and uses a nice 0-100 scale.
Yeah, other than that there is nothing better about it.
Re:References? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and when do you ever see outdoor temperatures over 50 or 60 on the Celcius scale? (never) And when do you see negative temperatures on the Celsius scale (all the time unless you live in a hot area)?
Fahrenheit has better resolution and scale for human temperatures. If it's over 100 or under 0, the weather is "extreme". Not so with Celsius. And it has roughly double the resolution.
Re:Google, really? (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if they can scale Watson up 1 billion times, that would solve nothing. Searching documents on the Internet is not that hard, in fact it's largely speaking a solved problem; especially when you add website browsing data (Google toolbar etc.) and click rates on the SERP to the traditional page-rank information derived from the link structure.
What is fiendishly hard is maintaining good relevance of your results in the face of a human, adapting and immensely rich adversary: the SEO industry. In that regard, Google algorithms are less about science and more about proprietary voodoo that only work if no one knows how they work. Kind of like the stock market, the search industry is infinitely reflexive and you can make a profit if you know what everybody thinks everybody else is thinking (and so on).
It would take just about a week for the SEO industry to find out what makes Watson tick and compel him to spew Viagra links for any search query.