True. When I said that, I was thinking of a service that does what Watson does and gives Google-style answers.
So, if the query "What is the capital of the United States" was made, at the top it would say Washington D.C. and after that it would show search results, similar to how Google shows answers to unit conversion searches.
There is a site, True Knowledge, that attempts to answer such questions using methods similar to Watson's.
It relies on NLP and "facts"; for example, the query "What is the capital of the United States" relies on this fact:
This fact asserts that the relationship '"is the capital of"' exists between "Washington, D.C." and "the United States" at some point in time. Other facts in the knowledge base assert that this fact applies for the following time periods:
Each "fact" is assessed by a variety o...
http://blog.reddit.com/2011/02/ibm-watson-research-team-answers-your.html