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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.'"
Watson? Jeopardy?
Does that mean we have to enter the answer an he gives us the question?
42?
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
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.
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!
Free Martian Whores!
Watson was a supercomputer answering basically one question at a time. You can't apply that level of compute time to every single query without bankrupting yourself on hardware costs. With time computer cycles will become cheaper and this will be more realistic, but today's technology just isn't there.
I read the internet for the articles.
Well, I guess I'm glad to see it's not just /. that's past it's prime :/
I mean, seriously - "What is someone else made a better search engine? ALL TRAFFIC WOULD GO THERE AND GOOGLE WOULD DIE" just seems so.... speculative.
(Maybe Wired has added a Creative Writing section since I last read it?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
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.
Which means there would be no reason for anyone to start their searches on Google.
... Dhar surmises, would provide a formidable combination of a machine that can remember, know, and think.
Sure there is. Start with what led Google to dominate search in the first place--interface minimalism. Google has become very good at returning results based on a minimal number of keywords about the desired topic; forming a question around the topic of interest is slowing one down in terms of keystrokes. And, generally, an answer to a specific question is not at all what one actually wants. What is sought is sources of information about a topic, for which a listing of highly-relevant links is superior to a single "the" answer. Is there anyone who doesn't type topic keywords over literal specific questions at, at minimum, a 20-to-1 ratio? No one I know.
But to simplify the issue, we have this. "Surmising" that Watson, or any known technology, can do any of the above disqualifies him from any commentary on any such technological issue or endeavor.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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.
And, if you malform a search string, you will get an error along the lines of
AEKJ6952 : Illegal Register Overflow
Watson will never displace Google, because of agendas, not technology.Google will spy on the people. Watson will manage their placement with FEMA.
This is not so when the internet (including browsers & carriers) is open and interoperable.
Right now, switching from Google to Duck Duck Go, Bing or Watson is litterally one click on most browsers.
I may agree that IBM **probably** won't develop Watson in this way, but they very well could and it would work as long as they gave users marginally better privacy with the same features.
The fact is, in a free market it is a CERTAINTY that someone will eventually exploit Google's vulnerabilities.
Any company can use their capital to lobby politicians to make laws favorable to their revenue stream...but in open competition, Google is highly vulnerable.
Facebook.com moreso :D
Thank you Dave Raggett
A couple of points.
First of all, RE PageRank... If people think PageRank is still all Google uses to process search results, they are living in a reality distortion bubble. PageRank is 20 years old, and everyone knows how it works. Google's algorithm relies on a lot more than PageRank, in fact PageRank is probably a very minor factor nowadays in what decides the top 50 results of a search.
Second, search is about a lot more than answering questions, and this is what I think people still don't fully understand about why Google is what it is and why they own this field so much. Search is just as much about FINDING the actual question, as asking the question itself. When people go to Google they often don't actually KNOW the question yet, all they have is something they want to know about. The real questions come later.
> I guess Google doesn't want to license the technology, they want to own it.
Absolutely. They can license or outsource payroll software, backup systems, communications - anything that is similar to what other companies have. Outsourcing SEARCH, the thing that makes them special, would be making themselves into an easily replaceable retailer for IBM.
Schwinn learned that the hard way. They were the dominant bicycle company. First they outsourced the manufacturing of parts, and that was fine. They designed and built bicycles, not gears. Then they outsourced assembly, and that worked okay - dealers had been doing some of the assembly for a long time anyway. When they taught their Chinese partner Schwinn's design secrets, they made themselves irrelevant. The company they outsourced too, Giant, just started selling the bikes without involving Schwinn.