A Chicago-based company is set to launch on Friday technology that will compete with Google Desktop Search and its Sidebar customisation feature.
Watson 2.0 is designed to understand the context of the text a computer user is reading or creating and automatically offer up relevant news articles, Word documents and other Web- or PC-based information — without the privacy concerns Google's service has raised — and in real-time.
The context-sensitive Windows search tool, developed by Chicago-based Intellext, is based on technology developed at Northwestern University.
"Nothing gets sent to our servers," as it does with Google's Sidebar service, said Al Wasserberger, chief executive of Intellext. Sidebar users only get the customised news and other feeds if they opt in to sending information to Google servers about what documents and Web pages are being viewed.
"Watson 2.0 uses an artificial intelligence approach to understand what you are working on and formulate queries," he said. "It sends the queries to the online (information) sources and compares the results against the document you are working on and then sorts (the results) according to relevance."
Like Google's Desktop Search and Sidebar, the software scours data from a variety of sources on the computer, Word documents, email, spreadsheets, and from Web sites, but it offers up relevant information in real-time rather than learning over time, as Sidebar seems to do.
Watson 2.0's side-pane interface does not squeeze in other information, such as a scratch pad, photos, quick-view history and weather, that Google's Sidebar offers, but it does take up a tad bit more screen space with the results it does offer.
Watson 2.0 also allows the user to add and modify the information sources being searched.
Talkback
Any one remembers Kenjin from Autonomy?
Did exactly what Watson is trying to do and it really isn’t a new concept. The down side to kenjin was that it didn’t have a decent information pool for news. Another factor, apart from Autonomy search being weak back then (maybe still is?), r was that the real time nature of the software it created a lot of traffic sending data too and fro the server as a user working on a document or was writing an email.
Yes, a lot has change, broadband is everywhere and machines are faster but it would still be interesting to see how Watson 2.0 works. Personally I find this type of "active" searches in the way of things. If I do need info on a particular subject area I will instigate the search my self using what ever "free" tools I have available.
A free trial is available but it’s not free so I aint shelling out money for it. Looking at their site the software seems to be aimed at businesses rather than the general public.
I don’t see this as a threat to Google's Desktop as their software is free and that’s because they depend on lots of people using it so it an easy transition for user to go from desktop to Google.com. This drives more traffic and makes them even more money via advertising!
yes i loved that tool and was gutted when autonomy went off to try and get companies to spend shitloads on knowledge management, so no more powerful tools giveaways for end users.
in fact, as i understand it, there is a watson competitor called blinkx that uses code licensed from autonomy.