> Google has been working on question answering for years now, but only exposes it when it is sure of the answers. I find this only works for very particular,

> Google has been working on question answering for years now, but only exposes it when it is sure of the answers. I find this only works for very particular, seemingly whitelisted, cases. For example, it does date of death well, but try to ask it the date of any other sort of historical event. It doesn't do the date of surrenders or famous battles, the day Columbus discovered America (it won't even tell me that date if I straight up search for "when is Columbus Day"). "When was the declaration of independence signed" gets me nada, and it can't tell me what year the Magna Carta was issued. It can tell me the day that Hitler died, but can't tell me when victory in Europe was declared. It can't even tell me when Enron went bankrupt, despite the first words in snippet under the first result for "when did enron go bankrupt" being "Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001" I'm not picking and choosing examples here, everything that I tried besides birth and death dates did not work for me. What Google is doing really seems like nothing but a parlor trick compared to what Watson can do. Maybe they really are doing all the same fancy math behind the scenes, but what is ultimately surfaced to me, the end user, is not impressive. (Note that although I can't get coherent responses from Wolfram Alpha with natural language questions, Wolfram Alpha can answer most of these things if you don't ask it questions that way. "Battle of Hastings date"? Wolfram Alpha can do that, Google can't.)