What happened to IBM’s WebFountain?

What excited me the most after I read “The Search” by John Battelle was the potential presented by IBM’s WebFountain. It clearly sounded like we were on the path to create “the perfect search”. However, when I searched Google, for IBM’s WebFountain, I was surprised to find that there was no development on this project since 2005. The most recent article I found was dated February, 2005 referring to a news article which mentions that Factiva dropped WebFountain because index refreshing was too slow.

I was almost convinced that Google was manipulating search results to display negative results about WebFountain at the top of its search results because WebFountain used to be called the “Google Killer”. I tried Bing, but the search results were identical. I suppressed my natural instincts and decided to look past the first three pages of search results, but could not find any content on the web which gave a clear picture of what happened to WebFountain. Just when I was about to throw my hands up and give up, I stumbled upon an article on how IBM’s Watson computer was crushing human competitors in the popular game show Jeopardy.

What is the connection between the Watson Computer on Jeopardy and WebFountain? IBM essentially uses the same technology that it used for WebFountain to deal with unstructured data. The quote below is from IBM’s website describing how Watson computer searches and analyses its results.

“When a question is put to Watson, more than 100 algorithms analyze the question in different ways, and find many different plausible answers–all at the same time. Yet another set of algorithms ranks the answers and gives them a score. For each possible answer, Watson finds evidence that may support or refute that answer. So for each of hundreds of possible answers it finds hundreds of bits of evidence and then with hundreds of algorithms scores the degree to which the evidence supports the answer. The answer with the best evidence assessment will earn the most confidence.”

Essentially, the difference between IBM’s Watson search methodology and Google’s or Bing’s methodology is that IBM’s results rely on the quality of the outcome as determined by IBM’s algorithm and statistical analysis and not based on what key words get linked to other sites. A simpler way of looking at it is IBM’s technology tries to think and understand the “intent” behind a query whereas other search engines cannot look beyond the actual words you typed in the search box.

While I am still not clear on what happened to WebFountain, I am glad that IBM has found other application for the technology and that “the perfect search” is still a reality.