Intellext a small search company based in Chicago, released a new version of its Watson product, called Watson 2.0, earlier this summer. Watson 2.0 offers web search results based on the content of your office files, like Microsoft Word, Office and PowerPoint. The “personal research assistant” by Intellext is now available as an add-in to the MSN search toolbar. So users can now have the same sidebar search assistance action by simply downloading the add-in for the MSN toolbar. The Watson 2.0 add-in download is currently available for a 30 day trial and after that it costs $10 a month or $99 for a year.
I could see this functionality being extremely advantageous to students and researchers that write lots of reports and white-papers since it appears the Watson could save users time in searching for supporting materials. I have no measurement of the relevancy or quality of these links and would have to do further research to quantify those points. However, here is the website to obtain additional information on Watson 2.0. Also check out these articles discussing Watson on PC Magazine and CNet News which considers Watson a competitor to Google's sidebar.
