Without diminishing the props that need to be given to the team at IBM Research which developed Watson, the author of this article has significantly overestimat

Without diminishing the props that need to be given to the team at IBM Research which developed Watson, the author of this article has significantly overestimated the general AI capabilities of Watson, while downplaying what is involved with Google Search. On the Google Search side, its algorithms are a lot more than just "the PageRank algorithm". The knowledge graph and its ability to remember and take advantage of context from previous searches are examples of this. On the Watson side, a huge amount of what it was doing involved identifying keywords and finding relevant information from the clue words. It did not really reason about questions or have a deep understanding of the semantic content of the query. It was hand optimized for the sort of questions that tend to be asked on Jeopardy, which was an impressive feat, but in terms of being able to create new knowledge, as the author suggests? The state of the art in AI is a long way away from that.