Google has made strong headway in the lower end of the market by selling dedicated search appliances - from $US2,000 to $US30,000 - that connect to a corporate network and let organisations run Google searches of their intranet and other internal documents. IBM's OmniFind Enterprise Starter Edition retails from $US18,750 - but this doesn't include the hardware to run it on.

While OmniFind Yahoo Edition the service is free, also not including hardware, IBM offers 24x7 support for $US1,999 per server per year.{moscomment}