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Watson seemed so impressive on Jeopardy. I don't understand why they work on making it into a general search engine. It would be much better than google.

Or even a restricted search engine that can read all of the papers on a given topic and then answer questions from those papers.

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My guess: Watson doesn't scale. The required resources to answer a given question is reasonable for a "question-every-minute" format like Jeopardy, but not something like thousands of questions a second.

Sounds like a caching layer would solve that problem.

It runs on a 20-80 teraflop computer and is not amendable to GPGPU acceleration. Perhaps that's why it doesn't scale.

It seems more like a (better) version of Wolfram Alpha than a general search engine.

this way they get more revenues. see, just the customer service in us is $150 billion market .what about global customer service?what about doctors,lawyers ,or every other type of knowledge worker ? if Watson is as good as ibm claims, all those people would pay alot of money to use it.

on the other hand ,all of the search engine market is less than $150 billion per yer,probably much less.

and not fighting with Google is also a great bonus.

Google is working on making a general search engine like Watson. I wouldn't be surprised if they even recruited someone who worked on Watson.

Can you please point to the source of this information, if any. I would like to read more.

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/04/kurzweil-google-ai/

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