Microsoft’s answer to Google Sidebar: Watson 2.0

Microsoft’s answer to Google Sidebar: Watson 2.0

Google recently released a major update to their desktop search utility and added an innovative sidebar feature to it. The sidebar acts an update panel showing customized information of what the user wants to see in it. Some of the features included Email alerts, News alerts and even the capability of searching the desktop and web through it. However, Microsoft has now set its eyes on providing a similar functionality application but only better.

The company has collaborated with the Chicago software upstart Intellext. And they would now be offering their automated Watson search engine available as an integrated online tool with Microsoft’s MSN desktop search product. Al Wasserberger, Intellext’s chief executive spoke about this offer: “We’re very excited about this. This is a huge distribution opportunity for us.”

Watson 2.0 would be launched sometime next week and it would feature a system to study the behavior of the user on the computer. It would monitor the content user is writing (in a word processor for example) or reading (from a web browser for example) and offer relevant related content from his hard disk and the internet in real time.

This is slightly different from Google’s application considering they never would require to recieve any data from the user’s computer for this content generation. Google on the other hand requires user to allow two way interactivity to generate content based on what the trends preferred by the user.

We at TechWhack are very excited to check out this product soon.