

Ask HN: IBM will kill Google with Watson? - dustyreagan

Now that IBM has a computer that can answer complex human language questions, beating the world's best Jeopardy contestants, what's stopping IBM from feeding Watson the entire Internet as his knowledge base, and giving him a front end website for user's to ask him questions?<p>Forget searching pages of Google search results. Watson could answer nearly anything you ask it in real natural language.<p>Sure it'll take a year or two more to refine Watson to scale, but all the hard work is done. Additional using his machine learning, Watson would get better and better as user's asked him questions. What say you Hacker News? Will IBM kill Google?
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mechanical_fish
I swear, all this box worship makes me think of The Prisoner, Episode Six,
"The General". Patrick McGoohan had the right take on this forty years ago.

At the risk of repeating myself, trivia questions are a game, not a source of
wisdom. They are a highly constrained genre: a good trivia question requires
no special expertise, can be answered in seconds by a human, and - most
important of all - has a single, unambiguous, indisputably correct, short
answer. In other words, it is the least important form of knowledge. They call
it _trivia_ for a reason.

It is doubtful that Watson will be particularly better at answering such
questions than Google plus a half-educsted human would be. It might be
_faster_ than that combo, but how often are fractions of a second of the
essence when Googling? It might not require the human to do as much, but
humans are a dime a dozen on Mechanical Turk.

Moreover, taking humans out of the search loop is self-defeating: Google makes
money _because_ a human must filter the results. Humans are susceptible to
advertising. Watson won't click on ads that he glimpses out of the corner of
his eye, and even if he did advertisers wouldn't pay for those clicks. So what
is WatsonGoogle's business model?

~~~
dustyreagan
Ok, so Watson couldn't yet answer "How do you change the oil on an 77
Corvette?" any better than Google could, but it could conceivably answer the
question "What size sockets do I need to remove the oil pan of a 77 Corvette?"
Is that trivia? I guess. But it's also practical knowledge that's time
consuming to find in Google search.

Also, I could be wrong, but I imagine a large percentage of searches are for
trivia. It wouldn't have to be all or nothing. Perhaps Watson answers trivia
like questions in clear english. For everything else he returns all the
resources he has that he thinks are related to the question, like Google does.
Heck, maybe Google partners with IBM to license the tech. Google's already
trying to answer some trivial questions outright in search, such as when you
ask for a definition, unit conversion, or simple math. Watson could take that
to a whole new level.

As far as a business model, I don't see why slapping an ad on where to
purchase the correct size sockets you need online beside your answer wouldn't
work.

~~~
brudgers
> _"What size sockets do I need to remove the oil pan of a 77 Corvette?" Is
> that trivia? I guess. But it's also practical knowledge that's time
> consuming to find in Google search._

Using Google or Watson is an inherently inefficient approach because it's
trivial to find the most practical answer with a socket set and a mechanics
creeper (and '77 Corvette). A shop manual doesn't hurt either.

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epc
No.

IBM has little to no interest in or tolerance for consumer facing web sites.
It tried developing a consumer web search in 1996 called "InfoMarket" and
killed it weeks before launch (and killed off IBM's own web site search in the
process as collateral damage).

While IBM does support a few sporting event web sites (which IBM has down to a
routine), I don't see IBM doing anything with Watson facing the general
public. Perhaps as a gimmick for a short period of time, but not a general
service.

~~~
pestaa
That was 15 years ago. I would really enjoy the show if IBM tried to backstab
Google and Facebook, while everybody thinks the race is between the latter two
only.

~~~
epc
IBM has spent the past 15 years getting only farther away from consumer facing
businesses. This one is a non-starter.

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abhikshah
I remember people asking the same kinds of questions when Wolfram Alpha was
released. Alpha and Watson work in very constrained spaces and transferring
their success to general search is very much non-trivial. So, no Watson will
not make a dent in Google.. It'll be a very helpful tool in specialized areas
but scaling it out is not a matter of a year or two..

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Vasu
Natural language query is the holy grail of search engine perfection. I am
sure, whichever company leads in this technology will have a prominent role in
future. Imagine, having this functionality in the cell phone? People don't
mind even paying monthly subscription to have this functionality.

------
dstein
Police detectives might be interested in using Watson to assist them in
solving murder mysteries.

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axod
They could brand him as a butler. Maybe rename him to Jeeves! What could go
wrong!!

