Watson 2.0: Too Elementary - Watson in Action
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Ready and eager to start working and have our capable assistant close at hand to feed us what we needed, we made our first stop – where else? – the SEO Chat page. Our faithful servant seemed to fail us right away here:
This is actually one of a number of issues we spotted with Watson (more on that later). Sometimes Watson proved to be reasonably light on his feet, fetching us information within about 10 to 15 seconds. Other times, we can only guess his old war injury caught up with him, as it took a minute, five minutes, and longer to get some kind of information. Sometimes, we didn’t get any information at all. By way of comparison, Dogpile, which also draws information from multiple sources, takes less than 10 seconds to return results.
When Watson does work, as it did with this Wikipedia page, the results can be pretty fruitful:
Watson gives you a title, source, and URL, which really doesn’t tell you a lot. When you highlight one of these, as we have here, a yellow tab comes up. Here’s a closer look at the one that came up for us:
As you can see, Watson takes bits of sentences from the page to give you some idea of what is on it. This does not always give you a good idea of whether that source will tell you what you need. In this case, Watson grabbed some phrases out of an ad. It didn't even grab very much, and the description is downright unhelpful. To be fair, however, Watson does better with certain pages:
If you don’t want Watson sitting there blankly taking up space while you’re working, you can minimize it. And yes, the program sits quietly in the background then doing its job. You may notice a light bulb icon added to your system tray. When Watson has results for you, that white light bulb flashes yellow.
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