Could IBM's Watson Put Google In Jeopardy?

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.'"

Comments

Google, really?

[nospam007]

Watson? Jeopardy?

Does that mean we have to enter the answer an he gives us the question?

42?

Re:Google, really?

[Samantha Wright]

More importantly, was this headline conceived specifically to foil machine-learning methods for inferring meaning from context? This seems profound in its poignancy.

Re:Google, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, like it or not, Watson requires lots of costly hardware and power to operate. If you want to give the masses access to that power, they're either going to pay for it, or he's going to recommend you drink Coca Cola (tm) to cure your AIDS.

Re:Silly question

[H0p313ss]

Tried this with Siri,not only did it find people selling fur-lined leather gloves, it also found photos of models wearing skimpy dresses with gloves on.

I'm sure there's a deeper meaning here.