How is deep blue playing Jeopardy anything more than eliza + google search?
The steamroller metaphor is intended to illustrate the brute force aspect of the approach. Google + deep blue burns many many orders of magnitude more calories than a human.
There is a fundamental difference between Deep Blue and Watson: Deep Blue truly did just do a brute force search of a decision tree. Watson does not. It employs machine learning techniques to find correlations between words in the questions and words in its (enormous) data store.
Yes, Watson is brute force compared to a human brain. But Watson is still fundamentally different than the brute-force approach of traversing decision trees of a well-defined rule set.
The steamroller metaphor is intended to illustrate the brute force aspect of the approach. Google + deep blue burns many many orders of magnitude more calories than a human.