IBM and Yahoo! try to out-Google Google in corporate land

Adam Turner
Wednesday, 13 December 2006 18:16

Your IT - Home IT

IBM and Yahoo! have joined forces to offer free tools for searching both corporate documents and the internet, challenging Google's hold on the low-end enterprise search market.

The new service involves expanding IBM’s existing enterprise search product, OmniFind, to include related web searches powered by Yahoo!. Known as OmniFind Yahoo Edition (OYE), it will index up to 500,000 documents or web pages, supporting 200-plus document types and 30 languages.

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.