IBM and Yahoo! Release Free Enterprise Search Tool

December 15th, 2006: IBM and Yahoo! Have teamed up to bring enterprises a new search tool that they claim will enable them to index and search documents on intranets and the internet with a single service.

Aimed at smaller enterprises without the expertise or budget to implement a comprehensive internal search system, IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a free, entry-level tool that can be downloaded and used with existing hardware.

OmniFind supports up to 500,000 documents per server, more than 200 file types and over 30 languages. It uses the open source Lucene indexing library to provide cross-platform full text indexing and features automatic spell correction, support for synonyms and shortcuts, wildcard support to substitute for unknown characters, query reporting and graphical user interface customisation.

In addition to this, it is also fully integrated with Yahoo!’s online engine, enabling searches to be extended onto the internet at large.

"Together, IBM and Yahoo! are delivering on the promise of making information easier to find, use and share while providing a better search experience for users," said Eckart Walther, vice president of product management for Yahoo! Search. "This is a valuable tool for helping organisations improve employee productivity by enabling them to more quickly find needed information. By empowering customers and partners to quickly find information on the Web, we're also able to reduce their support costs."

The release will put IBM and Yahoo! in direct competition with Google, which already sells low-end search tools to enterprises. Its Mini search technology costs between US$1,995 and US$8,995 and supports 50,000 to 300,000 – far less than OmniFind’s 500,000. Considering OmniFind’s price tag, Google may have some work ahead of it selling the benefits of its Mini search tool.

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