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.)

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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.

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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

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"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.

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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

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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.

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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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