Well this guy is a Google employee, so his bias is obvious. But I'm not optimistic about Google if most of their employees can't differentiate between the difficulties in doing database queries and constructing an answer from a question. It's a FAR bigger jump than when we went to Google from Alta Vista -- especially since, coincidentally, IBM had the same virtually the same technology that Google had at the time, but they weren't focused on search -- they just thought it was interesting technology.
And let me add, if this is so incremental, I'd love to Google just turn this feature on. Let me ask it any question and just have it return the answer. at the top of the results page w/o me having to click a link. I don't think we'll be seeing that from Google any time soon.
http://www.madpickles.org/rokjoo/2011/02/14/ibm-watson-vs-go...