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.'"
License tech to Google (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably much more profitable for IBM to license the technology to Google/Yahoo/MSFT/whoever than it would be for IBM to build search infrastructure.
Re:Better searches no good if they're too slow (Score:3, Interesting)
And you can be certain that Google is working on their own 'Watson' tech, so when the hardware is ready, they'll be able to do it.
Not just working on... has deployed, in a small way, to the degree that current capabilities can support on a massive scale.
That's what Google's Knowledge Graph work is about, and its work on natural language processing of search queries (including spoken queries). Google web search doesn't have Watson-level understanding, yet, but it has already moved well beyond the string matching + page ranking that the article supposes and is continuing to progress. Indeed, that progress is the source of many of the complaints about Google search here on slashdot. It has gotten much smarter, which makes it more effective in general, but means that it's less effective when what you want is a simple string search (though you can turn on verbatim mode to fix that).
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but not on anything related to this article or thread.)
Re:Google, really? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is more or less, what Wolfram is already trying to sell, though their parsing and indexing engine is weak compared to Watson and Google respectively.
Re:Google, really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Medical literature is a tiny world - much smaller even than the one that shapes Jeopardy questions. Medical journals are numbered in what, the hundreds? Many don't even publish monthly. I'd be willing to bet Google indexes more new content in a minute than there is new medical literature in a year.
On top of that you have a market for the research that can and will pay per query. Combine revenue per query with a small world to search and you can dedicate an enormous amount of processing power and time compared to that which Google can offer.