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December 13, 2006 (IDG News Service)

IBM Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have developed a free, entry-level, enterprise search application that at least one analyst believes will seriously disrupt the low-end segment of this market where Google Inc. has been selling many of its Mini search devices.

IBM and Yahoo plan to release the server-side application on Wednesday as a free download aimed at companies that haven’t tried out enterprise search due to cost and complexity concerns.

The software, called IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition, has been designed to be simple to install and use, and can index up to 500,000 documents from over 200 file types, including Adobe Systems Inc.’s PDF and Microsoft Corp.’s Word and Excel.

With that indexing capacity, IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition poses a significant threat to the Google Mini, an analyst said. The Mini is a hardware device loaded with Google search software that starts at $1,995 for 50,000 documents and tops out at 300,000 documents in its $8,995 edition.

Google will have to react in some way to this product, to differentiate the Mini from a free competitor with more indexing capacity,” said Matt Brown, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition isn’t comparable to more powerful mid-tier products like the Google Search Appliance, nor to high-end systems from companies like Fast Search & Transfer ASA and Autonomy Corp., Brown said. These mid-tier and high-end products have significantly more features, like the ability to index data from many more sources such as business applications.

However, this IBM/Yahoo product is precisely what Eric Brierley had been looking for. Brierley, chief technology officer of Decision Critical Inc., had researched tools like the Google Mini because he wanted to do a full-text indexing of the education and training materials the company stores in its databases and serves up to its health care clients. [Read More]