IBM announced a new technology today called “Watson” that they say can compete with human abilities in the game of Jeopardy. Although we have not yet seen examples of Watson in action, if true IBM may have a leg up in the powerful “semantic web” wars which will usher in the next generation of search tools – programs that do a much better job of understanding the meaning wrapped up in search queries.

Watson would be the first major breakthrough in semantic search in some time. Powerset, a company many felt held great promise in this field, debuted after much fanfare with a marginally useful product that only managed to work well within the somewhat narrow confines of Wikipedia content. Microsoft aquired Powerset over a year ago and to my knowledge no major improvements have been made since.

IBM’s “Web Fountain” may have something to do with their Watson effort – Web Fountain is arguably the best search in the world, though speed and scaling issues have made it non-competitive with Google.

Photo Credit:  Technology Report, CES 2009.