Basically IBM spent millions if not billions in research when a small company created a solution for a few thousand...

what is that company called? Well the first point is google acquired them in early 2010. The company and product are both called Aardvark, it is social search.

So, compared to Watson, how does it work?

Well rather simple, (and normally the best ideas are the simple ones!) it finds a person who can answer the question you ask - and it asks you questions that it thinks you can answer.

Basically a match-making service for question-answer pairs.

It does some simple natural language processing but only to figure out what topic you are asking about, and then it asks you to correct in case it made a mistake in the topic.

It runs out of a chat window, so you basically IM aardvark with your question and it IM's you back your answer! Or it will IM you a question... or even be nice and ask if you're busy first...

This makes it a great service for local knowledge, you can ask it for a good nigth club in a town you are visiting... but theoretically the network could include any group of people, knowledegable doctors could offer advice to other doctors about a treatment IF they are sharing this social network.

The best thing about it is it soo freaking cheap.

The worst thing is the lack of community. Unlike webdip, with our social rules and restraints, there is no intro to 'polite or acceptable' behaviour on aardvark. You can answer a question with : lmgtfy ( http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy ) but if everyone already knew that people only asked aardvark questions after google had failed them then this wouldn't be needed...

One person can tell you to lookup google, but there is no way to suggest to EVERYONE that they google things first... (though that is normally what most people do first anyway...)

The other downside is that if peopel are NOT on the network it can't contact them.

So i urge you, add arrdvark to you IM client, and you'll get a few questions each day that it thinks you can answer, and have access to what could be one of the greatest (cheapest) inventions ever to leverage the power of human computation!!

Also why are we bothering to waste money designing computers to do something which humans are already great at doing (natural language processing?) we're social creatures by nature! Let us continue to leverage this fact!!

Now i'll admit that Watson could probably learn a lot by asking questions on aardvark (and seeing if it can understand their responces... ) but i still thinks it's a horrible waste of a fucking super-computer.

Sure Watson can answer things a little bit faster than Aardvark, but it still has serious difficulties with some questions, and with 10,000 humans (professionals in any given field) connected to an aardvark network you'd get answers almost as fast AND you'd get, 'nobody knows that' as an answer some of the time (whereas Watson can also come back with, 'I don't really know for sure...')

I think Aardvark combined with wikipedia's community (which is much closer to a forum based conversation, ie a persistant one, rather than an IM-based one) will be the 'simple' idea which turns knowledge retriveal on it's head NOT Watson.