Watson 2.0: Too Elementary - Issues
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I have one more screen to which I’d like to direct your attention:
Imagine seeing that pop up and get in the way of your work. Annoying, isn’t it? What makes it even more annoying is that Mike got it every time he opened Word after installing Watson. It made Word take three extra seconds to start, and with as much time as we spend in Word, that adds up. It’s worth noting, however, that I haven’t experienced that problem.
One thing I found annoying (Mike less so) is the amount of real estate the program takes up. You can minimize it of course, and it still works. Even so, if you are running at a low resolution while you’re using Watson, this could become a real issue.
Watson supports only four search engines: Yahoo, Altavista, Dogpile, and MSN. We tried adding Google, but discovered that it would only search the Google domain. Watson did not do Google searches. That’s a real problem for folks who favor Google over other search engines.
Watson claims that it works with Firefox. We found that it did not work with Firefox as advertised. It did open search results in Firefox, but it does not performs scans or searches of pages browsed in Firefox. Effectively, then, it only works with Internet Explorer.
The problem we had with how slowly Watson returned results for web pages is worth reiterating here. Remember that your average person will wait only eight seconds for a page on the Internet to load. Since we have already loaded a page by the time Watson can do its thing, it’s not an issue if it takes a little while to bring us results. However, we’re pretty fast at digesting what’s on the page in front of us; in three minutes or less we’re ready to move on to the next page. And it happened far too often that Watson wasn’t ready for us.
In short, Watson performed unevenly at best, and slowly to the point of frustration at worst. We think we’ll wait before we hire an electronic research assistant like this; sadly, Watson did not meet our needs.
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