Daniel Newman wrote a piece on Millenial CEO that took a look at Watson, the super computer from IBM. Newman explores the possibility if Watson could change the search landscape.
Just Google It…Everyone Else Does
Right now when we want to know more about something, anything, we Google it; this isn’t an exception, this is the rule. In fact, 74% of the entire population turns to Google to start their information finding efforts.
This trend has been on the rise for sometime and as we have become more dependent on Google, we have helped turn the once search focused startup into the worlds second largest corporation besides Apple with their hands in advertising, big data, productivity applications and of course search. More or less our lives have become somewhat dependent on search and even if you are one of the “Rebels” that use Bing or Yahoo, your still turning to a search engine as the first response to your fact finding missions.
At this very moment in time search rules and everyone else scurries to make it work for them, but could that be changing?
Newman goes on to talk about the Hummingbird update that Google made, with one of the two major tenets of that update being an increased role for semantic search. Newman sees this as Google recognizing the need for search to be more human like.
The piece goes on to look at how Watson is affecting change. One of the elements is below:
Exploiting The Human Condition: People are social. Google has proven this and even Hollywood is playing on this with a movie like “Her” where a man falls in love with his device. The long and short of it is we want to interact with technology in a natural human way. While Google is making strides at this, no one (at least publicly) has shown the ability to humanize a machine the way IBM has done with Watson.
It is to be seen whether IBM and Watson are able to emerge as the next great leader in search and it may just turn out that Watson doesn’t change search, but it replaces search.
I suppose if we can just converse with our machines naturally and get useful and intelligent data in return, then why do we really need a search engine?
One thing is for sure, when the power of Watson which by the way can fit in just 3 pizza box size rack spaces is widely made available for our most innovative entrepreneurs to exploit, the outcomes are going to be good, real good.
Read the full story here
There’s always room for innovation in predictive models and search algorithms. Adding an AI supercomputers to the toolkit can’t hurt efficiency any.
What matters is who monopolizes the tools.
Cool stuff – take me back to logic circuits and my AI classes years back – but now the technology is there.
exciting times – just thinking of the show “Almost Human”