IBM and Yahoo Team on Enterprise Search
IBM and Yahoo have teamed up to help small companies sort through the hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of documents on their networks. On Wednesday, the two firms released the IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition search tool, a free download that can index up to 500,000 documents per server.
“Search is a huge issue for companies of all sizes,” said George Goodall, senior research analyst at the Info-Tech Research Group, adding that today, small firms with revenue in the millions are forced to cope with “the same amount of information that a billion-dollar company dealt with a decade ago.”
Indeed, the OmniFind tool is aimed at companies too small to afford more costly search products by Google, Fast, and Endeca, three of the largest names in the quickly growing enterprise search market. It helps them cope with more than 200 types of documents, from spreadsheets to memos to meeting minutes, not to mention contracts, calendars, Web sites, and wikis that have begun to clog servers with huge, messy stores of what’s commonly referred to as “unstructured data.”
In contrast, structured data resides in database systems, such as CRM and ERP software. It can be quickly searched by the database itself, without the help of third-party tools.
Too Much of a Good Thing?
IBM, Yahoo, Google, Ultraseek and others hope their enterprise search products will help workers pluck the one memo they need from the thousands on their network’s hard drives. Failing to find it — and failing to find information of any type — keeps knowledge workers from getting things done, which in turn scuttles productivity elsewhere in the company.
But finding information — information that’s best kept hidden or lost — can be a problem, too, according to Goodall. “Search can be very good at discovering all sorts of information that might be secure…
