Watson 2.0: Too Elementary - Getting Started
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The installation was pretty quick and painless. A wizard came up with the usual licensing notice, whose terms you had to agree to before continuing. It next pops up a registration screen, requesting various information (name, address, etc.), of which only your first and last name, email address, company or organization, and phone number are obligatory. I was not happy about being required to include my phone number.
After you have installed the program, you will have to restart your system to complete the process. If you happen to have a desktop search installed on your computer, you will see a pop-up box that looks rather like this:
Watson says that it can work with MSN Desktop Search, Google Desktop Search, and X1 Desktop Search, so this should not be a problem. We found that the program did use the desktop search, but much slower than simply doing the search yourself – a theme that will crop up again.
Watson 2.0 sits as a one to two-inch-wide bar going down the right side of your screen. It can be minimized, and even turned off, but there’s no getting around the fact that, when it’s on and running, it takes up a good bit of real estate.
The next screen I’d like to bring to your attention is this one:
This screen comes up when the program cannot find sources. This happens if you have nothing open, and/or Watson can’t find good enough keywords. But it doesn’t always come up; depending on how Watson feels, you might see a blank screen instead. In the many cases where it comes up blank, you can’t be quite sure if it is thinking about bringing back something or just sitting idly.
Naturally, you’ll want to do something to make sure you don’t see this very often, which brings us to our next screen:
This does not come up automatically. You need to go to Tools > Info Sources. A number of info sources are part of your default selection. Looking at the top left of this image, you can see a section that lets you add information sources. Double click this, and you get a screen in which you can enter a domain name, and a name for this new source (for example, if you enter http://www.reuters.com/ where it wants a domain name, you can simply call it Reuters in the line below). The program claims you can even specify entire top level domains, such as .gov or .uk. If you have the Web folder highlighted under Information Groups (top right), as we do in this image, you will see the new domain automatically added to the bottom right, labeled Information Sources in “Web.”
If you don’t want the source in that folder (Reuters really ought to be in News, after all), it’s pretty easy to fix. Click on the source, then hit the “Remove” button. Watson moves it back to the list on the left (you may have to hunt for it if you have a long list of sources there). Then open the folder you want to move it to, highlight the source, and hit the “Add” button.
You may also see the "Google" source in the screenshot above. That was not there by default. We had to add it, and it didn't even work. I'll get more into this later.
Next: Watson in Action >>
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