It was certainly a stye in the eye for Google (“organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”), whether facbricated by marketing/advertising or not.
But it wasn't really putting itself out there as a Google competitor. IBM wasn't saying, "buy this to make a better search engine", so I never once drew the Watson vs Google comparison when it all went down in 2011. Watson seemed to want to market itself as tech to drive expert systems instead (though it never really panned out) and now 9 years later, Google Assistant can answer questions of astou ding complexity, so whatever research Google was embarking on in 2011 has since born much more fruit anyway.
It was certainly a stye in the eye for Google (“organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”), whether facbricated by marketing/advertising or not.