What's new and changed in Watson Discovery

Important: IBM Cloud Pak® for Data Version 4.8 will reach end of support (EOS) on 31 July, 2025. For more information, see the Discontinuance of service announcement for IBM Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.X.

Upgrade to IBM Software Hub Version 5.1 before IBM Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8 reaches end of support. For more information, see Upgrading from IBM Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8 to IBM Software Hub Version 5.1.

Watson Discovery updates can include new features, bug fixes, and security updates. Updates are listed in reverse chronological order so that the latest release is at the beginning of the topic.

You can see a list of the new features for the platform and all of the services at What's new in IBM Cloud Pak for Data.

Installing or upgrading Watson Discovery

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Related documentation:

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.9

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in April 2025 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.9.

Operand version: 4.8.9

This release includes the following changes:

Version 4.8.9 of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

Issues fixed in this release
The following issues were fixed in this release:
Upgrading to Version 4.8.8 does not complete
Elasticsearch pods are not ready
Security issues fixed in this release
The following security issues were fixed in this release:

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.8

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in January 2025 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.8.

Operand version: 4.8.8

This release includes the following changes:

Version 4.8.8 of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

Issues fixed in this release
The following issues were fixed in this release:
Upgrade to 4.8.7 does not complete
The Elasticsearch statefulsets do not scale up
Security issues fixed in this release
The following security issues were fixed in this release:

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.7

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in October 2024 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.7.

Operand version: 4.8.7

This release includes the following changes:

Version 4.8.7 of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

Security issues fixed in this release
The following security issues were fixed in this release:

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.6

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in August 2024 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.6.

Operand version: 4.8.6

This release includes the following changes:

Version 4.8.6 of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

Issues fixed in this release
The following issues were fixed in this release:
Secrets are no longer automatically generated when the integrated OpenShift® image registry is disabled
Watson Discovery installation or upgrade does not complete because certain pods fail
RabbitMQ pod continues to run
Security issues fixed in this release
The following security issues were fixed in this release:

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.5

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in April 2024 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.5.

Operand version: 4.8.5

This release includes the following changes:

Version 4.8.5 of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

Issues fixed in this release
The following issues were fixed in this release:
Watson Gateway pods in a crash loop after upgrading
Several security patches were applied

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.4

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in March 2024 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.4.

Operand version: 4.8.4

This release includes the following changes:

Issues fixed in this release

This release includes the following fix:

Issue: Watson Discovery orchestrator pods not starting because ResourceQuota is applied to the namespace.

Resolution: This issue is now fixed.

Several security patches were applied

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.3

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in February 2024 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.3.

Operand version: 4.8.3

This release includes the following changes:

Version 4.8.3 of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

Issues fixed in this release
The following issues were fixed in this release:
Dictionary and Part of Speech facets are not shown in Content Mining projects
Several security patches were applied

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.2

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in January 2024 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.2.

Operand version: 4.8.2

This release includes the following changes:

Version 4.8.2 of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

Several security patches were applied

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.8.0

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in November 2023 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.8.0.

Operand version: 4.8.0

This release includes the following changes:

New features
Version 4.8.0 of the Watson Discovery service includes the following features and updates:
Enrichments are highlighted in distinct colors
When you select multiple enrichments in the advanced document view for PDF and text, each enrichment type is highlighted in the document with distinct colors. Overlapping enrichments are also highlighted in a distinct color.
Narrow the field of a search
Now, when you query data from the web client, you can specify the fields to search in. Searching specific fields improves search results when content is not indexed in the default fields. For example, content might not be indexed in the default fields when you ingest structured files or when you apply a Smart Document Understanding model. For more information, see Excerpt unavailable in the Watson Discovery documentation.
Start or stop crawling a collection
You now have the option to start or stop the scheduled crawl of a collection without changing the crawl schedule. For example, you might want to stop a crawl if you don't want the crawl to occur during a long-running task. For more information, see Stopping a crawl in the Watson Discovery documentation.
Updated tokenizer for all languages
The updated tokenizer might affect the ranking order of results for certain queries. If you observe any ranking differences in your query results, you can re-index the documents in the collection.

Watson Discovery tokenizes words when it ingests and stores data in the index, and at run time, when it analyzes queries that are submitted by users. By re-indexing the collection, you ensure that your documents are indexed with the same tokenizer that is used for matching queries.

To re-index documents, open the Manage collection page, choose a collection, and navigate to the Enrichments tab. Select a field to enrich, and then clear the field. Next, click Apply changes and reprocess and wait for the documents in the collection to be reprocessed.

For more information on re-indexing a collection, see Manage enrichments in the Watson Discovery documentation.

The part of speech enrichment is now needed only for content mining project types.
The part of speech enrichment was used for dictionary suggestion. The dictionary suggestion is now updated to work without the part of speech enrichment applied. However, for content mining projects, the part of speech enrichment is available as before.
Search for terms to label as entity examples
You can now search for terms that you want to label as entity examples in a document. You can also search for labeled and unlabeled entity examples, and you can correct any labeling inconsistencies. For more information, see Searching for examples using keywords in the Watson Discovery documentation.
Export labeled data from entity extraction
You can export labeled data that you identified when you labeled documents for entity extraction. You can use the labeled data to train or build large language models (LLMs) with services like Watson Studio and Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP). For more information, see Exporting labeled data for an entity extractor in the Watson Discovery documentation.
Issues fixed in this release

This version of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

The following issue, which was reported by customers, is fixed in this release:
Several security patches were applied