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You probably go to Google when you need to run a search, but use Watson and the search comes to you.

Watson is a brilliant new search tool that promises to deliver search results that users never knew they needed and save countless hours of research time. When you're working in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Internet Explorer, Watson quietly observes what you're doing and runs metasearches in the background. When you break — because it wouldn't be polite to interrupt — Watson asks if you'd like to see what it found.

Watson began life as the Ph. D. project of Jay Budzik, then a graduate student at Northwestern University. Now the Chief Technology Officer of Intellext, a 12-person company based in Chicago, Budzik and his team developed Watson until it was ready for its commercial debut on Jan. 31, 2005.

Watson comes in three flavors, for individuals, small companies, and enterprise. Download the free 30-day trial version from Intellext to check it out. After a brief installation, you can set where Watson looks for information and when it runs. Besides searching the Web, it can comb through e-mail, intranet sites, corporate document libraries, online photos, and more. If you subscribe to information services like Hoover's or Factiva, you can set Watson to automatically search those, as well.

After the installation, you'll see a new pulldown menu in Word, PowerPoint, and Internet Explorer with a light bulb icon. Watson intelligently scans your current document and runs metasearches on the material. When the light bulb turns yellow, you know that Watson has search results for you.

Click the icon and Watson's own interface opens, displaying your results. You can view the top results or look at only results from a particular source, such as e-mail or internal documents. You can even view blog-only results, to see what bloggers are saying on the topic.

The beauty of Watson is that it gives you results you didn't know you needed. Without bothering to run a search, you'll get results that perfectly suit your project. If Watson's results are too broad, you can give the search more focus by highlighting a term in your document and telling it to run again. You can also focus the results using the search box on Watson's own interface.

A tabbed interface lets Watson keep track of several searches at once. The developers obviously care about privacy, because Watson doesn't remember searches from one session to another and it doesn't store results on a central server.

Watson's Standard plan, for individuals, costs $99 per year. The Professional plan, for small businesses with less than 500 employees, carries a one-time fee of $200 per user and a yearly maintenance fee of 20 percent of the total cost. The Enterprise plan, for large companies, requires a purchase of the management and reporting server, which costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, we were told, as well as a per-seat cost. Contact the company for more specific pricing.

The Enterprise version also includes sophisticated management tools and reporting capabilities that let you know how Watson is being used. For privacy, it only aggregates results and doesn't give information on specific users.

Watson lets you view search results from different sources with the left-hand navigation, or view the results of different searches with the yellow tabs along the bottom.