The section of the Watson Explorer Engine User Manual entitled Watson Explorer Engine Applications and Services provides an overview of all of the processes and long-running services that Watson Explorer Engine uses. The most critical of these, the Search Service, was introduced at the beginning of Starting, Stopping, Managing, and Monitoring Global Services, and was discussed in detail throughout Working with the Search Service.
The following sections discuss how to interact directly with services that directly build search collections, the Crawler Service and the Indexer Service. In most cases, you will not need to interact with these services directly, but the Watson Explorer Engine API provides functions that enable you to do so should you need to.