Brain-reading technology has been in use for years. It's possible that direct mental interfaces will completely obviate the keyboard, mouse and touchscreens in the near future, but it's a pretty distant possibility. As impressive as the technology is, it hasn't been shown to be anywhere near suitable for this application yet.
Who's to say that Watson's technology is even sufficiently well-suited for a search engine that it would give not only better results than Google, but results so much better that it would overcome inertia? Google has over a decade of machine learning specifically applicable to search engines. The fact that Watson does cool stuff on Jeopardy doesn't mean it's anywhere near ready to beat Google at its own game.
Simply put, these things are possible in the boolean sense of "not impossible," but are they remotely likely? No, I don't think so. They're stupendously unlikely.
IBM seem to only be interested in applying it to Medical. It's probably way too processor intensive to use as a search engine, and they can make lots of money selling hardware to hospitals instead of making pennies on ads.
Who's to say that Watson's technology is even sufficiently well-suited for a search engine that it would give not only better results than Google, but results so much better that it would overcome inertia? Google has over a decade of machine learning specifically applicable to search engines. The fact that Watson does cool stuff on Jeopardy doesn't mean it's anywhere near ready to beat Google at its own game.
Simply put, these things are possible in the boolean sense of "not impossible," but are they remotely likely? No, I don't think so. They're stupendously unlikely.