One of the pieces of news that was making the rounds over the past week, at least in my little corner of the twitter-sphere was news that Watson a computer system baked up by the fun folks at IBM beat the pants off two of the all time best players on the popular trivia show Jeopardy. Like its predecessor Deeper Blue in 1997 who beat the pants off of the then world’s best human chess champion… Watson was designed from the ground up to perform a specific task, and to do it quite well thanks to modern capabilities around processing power, data storage and hundreds of simultaneous algorithms tasked with interpreting the natural human language.

But reading a bit more of the press about the event, something caught my eye, a reference to the fact that Watson doesn’t even use the Internet.  To which my immediate reaction (yes I think I’ve become a jaded and skeptical New Yorker) was something like this, well if it coulda, it woulda, so since it didn’t…  well something is up.   And my suspicions were confirmed when the author of the IBM post was kind enough to elaborate that yes he believed that accessing the free and open Internet for information would have been detrimental to Watson’s performance. Which upon reflection makes all the sense in the world…  why would you sift through the entire Internet of information, when you can carefully curate all the information you need for the job in less that 1 terabyte of data held in 90 servers stacked up back stage.

Now like most people, I don’t have a clue as to how much general knowledge trivia there is in the world, uh… a lot? But am I a little surprised that it  can all be crammed into 90 computers, well yeah I guess so, I’ve never really thought about it. I am certainly impressed with the fact that Watson can fish out any little corner of it in about the same time as it would take Alex to type in the question.

But I guess my whole point here is the bigger picture stuff… the folks at IBM wanted to solve a single problem… find answers to trivia questions.  And with the state of things in the world of processing, data storage and algorithms getting, storing and retrieving that information was best done in a closed environment…  the 1TB of factual data necessary, apparently not that big of a deal.

So getting back to local search. Now I had not dealt with buying or selling web search in quite some time now, but within the past couple of years I have started to go back to shows like SMX East, the east coast edition of one of the larger search marketing trade shows, where the subject of local search is a pretty hot topic these days.  What surprised me a bit is that finding places and things in the real world was generally just viewed as more or less the same as searching for and finding web pages about places and things.

Maybe it’s just me but this just seems downright weird.  The web is home to billion if not trillions of pages of content on topics ranging from what Julie in San Jose had for dinner last night to how to calculate the weight of an African tree frog… 99.9% of which has absolutely nothing to do with what’s in the ½, 5 or 10 mile radius around me where I live the vast majority of my life.

Now if someone can sort out the web stuff that’s relevant to my little physical personal world that would be an improvement, but still people put some pretty useless and irrelevant stuff on the web, thousands of people I don’t know or care about and a huge chunk of retail businesses with no significant web presence to speak of.

What I need is just access to the stuff that is relevant to me, good detailed information on stores and products, people I know or might like to know or communicate with, events, relevant news etc.  Much of this information already exists, but like with Watson, just because it exists doesn’t mean that one can get at it quickly and easily, and sorting through the entire web of content to find it, well just wouldn’t be the best way to do it.

Until last night I wasn’t very aware of what folks were doing in terms of creating hyper local networks, but at the LBS Apps developer meet up last night here in NYC,  a company called Nearverse demo’d  their app LoKast. The application allows an organizer to create an ad hoc local network between users of the application who all share a common space of between 300-1000 ft… using a combination of Bluetooth, wi fi or your cell carriers’ wireless data connection.  With file sharing at its foundation, the idea is to allow folks who share a common space to share, well…almost anything digital that they want, including videos, songs, photos, contacts or webpages.

Now Nearverse doesn’t seem to be looking at areas around local search necessarily, and I am not sure if it really directly fits, but it would seem to support the idea that just because there is the capability to push info out to the one mass Internet doesn’t mean that this is the best and only way to do something. Perhaps million of tiny micro locally relevant Internets that just contain locally relevant data, or a massive database of only locally relevant data that is built around location from the ground up would be two novel ways to help connect people with just the relevant info about the world directly around them.

I dug around to get the latest and greatest, and it looks like in the good old fashioned web world search is about 45% of ad revenue today with premium display close to a 1/3. So Kelsey’s predictions for the mobile world certainly seem to magnify the trend we’ve seen so far on the web with search having an even bigger role and display, a decidedly smaller role. To some degree this makes a lot of sense, since the small footprint of the mobile handset doesn’t leave a lot of room for all that lovely creative ad work, the sight sound and motion and all, and search is simple, quick and to the point which is well suited to the phone.

An even more interesting part, was not just the AMOUNT of search revenue, but the TYPE of searches expected… citing data from Google that mobile searches are 2-3x more often to be local in nature than searches done via a desktop, The Kelsey Group calls for over 1/3 of mobile searches to be “local” in nature in five years, and for over half of that whopping $2.27B in search revenue to be generated from “local” search queries.

Kinda makes you wonder what kind of local stuff all those folks will be searching for on their phones and who will be the benficiaries of that cool $1B+ in local oriented search ad spending.

So here goes, this post is purely pandering to that unbridled demand for Apple related rumors and what ifs.

The news this am is thanks to TechCrunch, Is Apple Building A Search Engine? to summarize it goes something like this:

Yes Apple is building its own search engine because:

Well, one solution is to grow the whole pie by growing the gross number of searches conducted. So how do you do that? For starters you make it super easy and convenient to run a search query, like search on a mobile phone (Google Mobile) while you’re out and about and while at your desk through a browser toolbars that is always there, ready and waiting (Google Toolbar). Second you try to get more and more of the world’s information into the index to make it findable, for example by scanning book or making it easy for any Joe Schmo to create new information say like in a blog on Blogger (acquired 2003).

In fact, the worldwide web has grown like wildfire over the past decade with the Google index growing from 26 million pages in 1998 to 1 billion pages in 2000 and an estimated 1 trillion today. So needless to say there is a lot of information out there to be found, and Google’s success has been built on developing the best mousetrap to help folks sift through those 1 trillion pages and find the information they’re looking for, largely relying on that popularity contest dressed up as a math equation called PageRank to help us uncover the needles among those 1 trillion straws of hay.