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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

The next Google is "IBM's Watson" patched in through your smart phone so someone can punch in a natural language question and get back a reasonable natural language response from a simulated person with IQ of 5000.

If you can build even a primitive version of this deployed well, it would be the Google-killer. Have it answer everything from 'how do you make a for loop in php' to 'what cinemas near 32807 are playing Cars 2'? I don't want pages of links, I want concise understandable objective correct answers.

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I agree with you, but Watson has some pretty hefty hardware requirements:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/what-makes-ibms-watson...

Bringing Watson to a large audience would be an immense technical undertaking. The real "next Googles" will probably be the hardware companies that make the mass deployment of a Watson-type system possible.

Edit: Formatting

There's no need to mass deploy it for it to work for the public. It can just query requests over network like maeon3 suggests.

"It can just query requests over network like maeon3 suggests."

Of course, you do realize that requests over a network need a server to reply to them? Millions of people making such requests would need quite a fews servers indeed. That is where the mass deployment would come in.

Still, I wonder... If someone was crazy enough, they could probably accomplish quite a bit with data scrapers, regular expression matching, and some distributed computing fairy dust.

Yes the hardware requirements are ridiculous and the business model even more so. There would be tricks to lessen the load, reverse proxies so that when a question is answered it doesn't have to be re-answered until the question requires a re-evaluation. Redevelop IBM's Watson to run on armies of cloud servers and computers. Make the service free, every human gets a key and can consume X minutes of Watson a day. Have a high-priced "premium service" where you can buy more of Watson's time and get real time re-evaluations to questions.

Yes it would be a more massive undertaking than Larry and Sergey took for google, maxing out their credit cards on hardware. But you would get your name written in the sands of time as mass deploying the first army of semi sentient machines to service the masses. This project brings us a step closer to a type II civilization.

Did you mean Wolfram Alpha?

PowerSet.

Which got bought by Bing...

Wolfram Alpha took the natural language query "list of cinemas playing cars 2 near 32807" and responded with:

"Binary form: 1000000000100111_2"

'A' for effort, but this is not a Google killer until I am provided a list of cinemas with addresses arranged in table format.

Yeah, I kind of got excited about WA after using it for a few things, but I run across results like yours enough that I now use WA only for new variations of things I've successfully searched for before. It rocks when it rocks, but the rest of the time the coffee cup sounds well before TDC.

I mostly use WA to compare weather in areas and compare land mass. They had some interesting demos, but based on the hype I expected a better answer to "how many ping pong balls to fill a VW Bug"

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