NEW YORK: IBM Corp and Yahoo Inc. are joining forces to offer a free data search tool for businesses and corporate users in a bid to take on market leader Google.
IBM already has a similar business-focused search product, OmniFind, which helps users to search internal documents. The agreement with Yahoo envisages offering a new and free edition of OmniFind, which will be limited by the number of documents that can be queried. However, it can combine the results with results from web searches using Yahoo's search service.
A somewhat similar service is already available through a unified effort of Google, Autonomy Corp. and Norway-based FAST, which have teamed up with business software firms including Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.
IBM thinks the service will support its efforts to cater to small businesses in a better manner.
Google has been offering its search products (including hardware) at prices beginning $2000 and going up to $30,000. The product at the premium level is capable of searching 500,000 documents. The IBM-Yahoo venture too has fixed the limit of searchable documents at this level. And the service is free.
A Yahoo spokesperson said the company will focus on the web search part of the agreement and will not be getting into enterprise search.
IBM's program director for information management Marc Andrews, says the OmniFind edition that will be offered under the agreement is aimed at undercutting midrange enterprise search offerings from Microsoft and Oracle.
The basic technology for the product is that of IBM, but the interface belongs to Yahoo. Users doing search of corporate data with the new product will have the results listed in the same format as Yahoo's search results, but without any ads. However, the links will include web pages hosted by Yahoo. This is just to boost its traffic. And these pages will have ads and sponsored links.
The product is freely downloadable.
