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.

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.