The problem that Google solves and the problem that Watson solves are completely different. Sure, there is some overlap, because you might be able to type a Jeo

The problem that Google solves and the problem that Watson solves are completely different. Sure, there is some overlap, because you might be able to type a Jeopardy question (answer?) into Google, and, as a human, quickly and easily find the correct answer. This is a side effect of very well-tuned retrieval algorithms that search for just the right words in your query, take into account user click-throughs for similar queries, and rank information based on billions of documents and eleven years of experience. The Jeopardy problem is concerned natural language processing and knowledge representation as opposed to a tumult of data. I would wager that Watson's internal database is structured more like a single ontology than a highly distributed grid. The challenge here is mapping key parts of the question to this ontology and returning a single, highly precise result.