The reason Google Search works well is because through many of it's iterations it actually uses crowdsourced data from real humans to answer questions. Whether

The reason Google Search works well is because through many of it's iterations it actually uses crowdsourced data from real humans to answer questions. Whether it is the simple initial vote of confidence by links, to google's ever changing internal data about clickthrough rates, personalized results, search volumes and general user behavior, or simply from the many hardcoded questions in certain format ("What is the capital of Spain?" or "distance from the sun to jupiter"), Google is continuously getting better at judging intent and answering questions. Similarly for a lot of the other technologies, such as translations, the real work is being done by consumers and users who generate the gigantic corpus of data. The question is -- does IBM have access to the same amount of data?