# Elasticsearch vs IBM watson

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-vs-ibm-watson/68887>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [December 13, 2016, 3:07pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-vs-ibm-watson/68887 "2016-12-13T15:07:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![sunilmchaudhari](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/sunilmchaudhari/32/9475_2.png) [@sunilmchaudhari](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/sunilmchaudhari)\
**Post date:** [December 13, 2016, 3:07pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-vs-ibm-watson/68887/1 "2016-12-13T15:07:53Z")

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Hi,  
Can anyone comment on ELK stack vs IBM watson?

br,  
Sunil

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**Author:** ![polyfractal](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/polyfractal/32/48162_2.png) [@polyfractal](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/polyfractal)\
**Post date:** [December 13, 2016, 4:13pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-vs-ibm-watson/68887/2 "2016-12-13T16:13:55Z")

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They are very different 🙂

I think [this quote from Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)) is relevant:

> The key difference between QA technology and document search is that document search takes a keyword query and returns a list of documents, ranked in order of relevance to the query (often based on popularity and page ranking), while QA technology takes a question expressed in natural language, seeks to understand it in much greater detail, and returns a precise answer to the question

Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. You can use it to search whatever you want: natural text (in any language), images, DNA sequences, etc. Elasticsearch gives you documents that match your query. `"Find all documents with text similar to 'quick fox' AND price > 5"`

Watson is a "question answering engine" driven by machine learning and natural language processing. Watson _answers_ questions, as opposed to finding documents that are relevant to your query. `"What is 5 + 5?"`

Parts of Watson internally use search technology. Or put another way, you could build a Watson yourself which utilizes Elasticsearch for some of the processing (searching the expert knowledge, retrieving relevant docs, calculating feature/language vectors, etc), but you would need a lot of other components too (language decomposition, PoS tagging, hypothesis generation/testing, etc)

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [January 10, 2017, 4:14pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-vs-ibm-watson/68887/3 "2017-01-10T16:14:11Z")

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