IBM and Yahoo! launch free enterprise search product

Filed under: Business, Windows, Linux, Yahoo!, Freeware

IBM and Yahoo! launch free enterprise search product

by Jordan Running Dec 13th 2006

Taking an unexpected jab right at Google's Enterprise Search Appliance, IBM and Yahoo! have teamed up to launch IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, a free search solution that will index "up to 500,000 documents and over 200 file types in 30 different languages." OmniFind Yahoo! Edition will run on Linux (Red Hat Enterprise and SUSE Enterprise, to be specific), Windows XP, or Windows 2003 Server. The minimum requirements specify 1GB of RAM and 80GB of hard drive space, but the recommended specs call for dual 3Ghz processors, twice the RAM, and 250GB of mirrored disk space. Google's "Mini" search appliance, by contrast, starts out at $1,995 including hardware, and tops out at 300,000 documents for $8,995, and its more full-featured search appliance starts at $30,000.

Yahoo! and IBM tout the OmniFind system's ease of setup, ("Go from installer to searching in minutes"), so for organizations who can gather the hardware and install the software themselves and need to index fewer than half a million documents, Google's appliances' bang to buck ratio suddenly doesn't look very healthy.

[Via CIO]

Tags: enterprise, free, google, ibm, omnifind, search, yahoo

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Donald Jessop said 5:49PM on 12-13-2006

Ha ha ha. I love how you've fallen for the marketting hype from IBM. Yes, the software is free, but you forgot to add in the cost of the hardware!!!! You do that and their solution is no better or worse than Googles. The smaller you go, the better bang for the buck you get from the Google appliance. The last time I checked, a dual 3.0GHz box with 250GB mirrored drives and a bunch of RAM was not cheap. (OK, you can buy it cheap if you build it yourself, but many organization buy pre-made from Dell.)

Jordan Running said 5:52PM on 12-13-2006

Um.. that was pretty much my point, Donald. Re-read the post's last sentence again.

M@ said 8:26PM on 12-13-2006

I would MUCH rather use this then anything by google whom lost my trust.
This is interesting, I noticed when you click on http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/register/form.php if you look at the status bar at the bottom you can see google-analytics load.

Zeno Davatz said 5:38AM on 12-14-2006

Na na na. This is well done! Of course you need CPU Power but hey, it installed on my Gentoo-Linux like a charm and was very easily configured. I'm now crawling http://www.dhs.gov and my home-Directory. My CPU is 99% ;(

What I still miss is the Linguistical Database:
http://www.ywesee.com/pmwiki.php/Ywesee/InfoCodexProcedure

The AJAX Interface is well done!

Congrats Guys!

Best
Zeno

Mike Davis said 8:15AM on 12-14-2006

"Yes, the software is free, but you forgot to add in the cost of the hardware!!!!"

Donald, last time I checked, being able to search and index 500,000 documents for roughly $2,000 (for reasonable hardware and an o/s license) was cheaper than doing the same for only 50,000 documents for $1995 with Google's mini. Yeah, the Yahoo/IBM approach is not really free, but that's still a 10-to-1 advantage over Google.

The Google search appliance web site doesn't say explicitly (that I could find), but it looks like that $1995 license might have to be renewed every two years, and (if so) that's even more money out of your pocket to Google.

For some organizations that are large enough to have spare equipment, it really will be free from a hard cost perspective.

I'm glad someone finally decided to put some pressure on Google so that maybe their appliance prices will come down.

Brandon said 7:50PM on 12-14-2006

IBM and Yahoo makes for an interesting team. I look forward to watching this one develop and hearing the good, the bad, and the ugly on this product.

Thanks for sharing the news Jordan.

-Brandon from Austin

Peter said 3:09PM on 12-15-2006

A big problem with this is that the index is not updated automatically. So if you add or change documents you need to log in and manually re-index the files.
That's a deal-breaker as far as I'm concerned.

Zeno Davatz said 5:22AM on 2-01-2007

I changed my mind. This stuff was pure marketing hot-air. Does not work for me, is not useful and only has a nice interface. That is it. But the Ajax is well done! That is good. But the Ajax is also not soo difficult to do...

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