IBM releases free search software for small, midsize businesses

IBM’s free OmniFind Yahoo Edition takes aim at Google, Microsoft offerings

By John Fontana, Network World
December 13, 2006 10:03 AM ET

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IBM and Yahoo Wednesday released free search software aimed at small and midsize businesses that want to search across their internal documents and content. IBM is using price to combat competitors who also are trying to aim entry-level search software at corporate and departmental users.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition will let companies crawl file servers and index intranet pages. It also includes an option for searching across the Web via Yahoo search. The entry level software, which runs on Windows or Linux servers, lets users index as many as 500,000 documents per server, supports more than 200 file types and can read files in more than 30 languages. Unlimited telephone support is available from IBM for $2,000 per year.

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With the new release, IBM is not only making a play to boost the visibility of its OmniFind line of search software, but also taking a shot at Google, which offers an entry-level search product, the Mini, that is priced at $1,995. IBM also hopes to put pressure on Microsoft, which just introduced the SharePoint Server 2007 for Search, which is only available to Microsoft's volume licensing customers.

IBM’s search family
IBM brought together a number of search technologies under the OmniFind name that are aimed at everything from small users to complex corporate search infrastructures.

Related Content

OmniFind lineup	Features	Target market	Former name
Yahoo Edition	Searches across file servers and intranet Web pages.	Small and midsize businesses; large corporate departments.	New product
Enterprise Starter Edition	Scaled down version of Enterprise Edition limited to two-processor deployment.	Smaller-scale or departmental-level secure search.	WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Starter Edition
Enterprise	Pre-built integrations to more than 25 enterprise sources including shared file systems, relational databases.	Best suited for secure intranet search deployments.	WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition
Discovery	Extracts knowledge from unstructured, structured data sources using ability to understand user intent and application context.	Configurations to support specific deployments such as e-commerce, business intelligence; and contact centers.	WebSphere Content Discovery Server