Yahoo, IBM Toss Their Results in Enterprise Search

Yahoo  and IBM  are brand new buddies on the search front with their OmniFind Yahoo Edition creation. The free, entry-level search program may even force Google  to take its eyes off the race for entry-level enterprise search customers.

The IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition allows companies to index up to 500,000 documents, more than 200 file types and documents in more than 30 languages, IBM and Yahoo said. The new enterprise search is a three-click install and comes with the open source Lucene library for cross-platform, full-text indexing.

The downloadable version of OmniFind matches the popular Mini appliance pin-for-pin that Google offers, one analyst noted.

Since 2003, Google has dominated the basic enterprise search arena, first offering the Google Search Appliance then the low-cost Mini, making it easy for small companies to implement search. Now, the downloadable IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition is offering the same simplicity and power of Mini and Search Appliance, which cost about $2,000 and $30,000, respectively.

This much is clear: Google no longer has the entry-level search market to itself, noted Forrester Research analyst Matthew Brown. With IBM, Yahoo, Microsoft , Oracle  and others competing, enterprise search has become stratified. Today’s announcement won’t improve the lot of those players, but IT professionals looking for an alternative to Google are the big winners, he added.

“This creates headaches for Google,” he told internetnews.com. Faced with new competition, Google may want to differentiate itself, perhaps by upping the capacity of its enterprise search appliance, the Mini. At any rate, the new software enables Yahoo to gain a greater foothold within enterprises. For IBM, the agreement could shine more light on the little-known OmniFind brand. All of this, Brown added, adds up to better results for enterprise customers looking for the best way to improve their own searches.