Yahoo and IBM Offer Free Enterprise Search

Yahoo makes an enterprise search solution from IBM free and is very proud about that: "we don't believe that small and mid-sized businesses (or even large enterprises!) should need to spend $1,995 or more to get a reliable and robust enterprise search solution". Yahoo refers to Google's search appliances that cost a lot of money: from $1,995 the cheapest Google Mini to more than $30,000 for Google Search Appliance.

IBM OmniFind from Yahoo "indexes up to 500,000 documents and over 200 file types in 30 different languages". It's a software available for Linux and Windows, that can be downloaded for free. System requirements are pretty rough: 2 processors at 3 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, 250 GB free space.

On the other hand, Google Search Appliance is an integrated hardware/software solution that uses Red Hat Linux, 2 dual-core Intel Xeon processors and 16GB of RAM (GB-1001).

Unlike Omnifind, Google's solution looks at the connection between documents and tries to do for intranet what Google does for Internet: ranking search results by relevancy analyzing link structure.

Yahoo's entry in enterprise search market shows that Yahoo continues to outsource search, but it choose excellent products for that.