Test Center Daily | InfoWorld Staff » Review: IBM and Yahoo give the gift of free search

December 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Review: IBM and Yahoo give the gift of free search

TAGS: Search

Enterprise search often defines massive projects that federate information from the Web, portals, legacy databases, and business intelligence systems. Yet many organizations thrive on finding information on the Web and within their intranets or file shares -- without a lot of fuss or expense.

Today, IBM and Yahoo formally delivered an early holiday present to do just that. I unwrapped IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition last week for testing. My conclusion: Thank-you cards are definitely in order.

This search application, available for Linux or Windows servers, installs in under five minutes using a Java GUI. From here, an admin-friendly Web console let me define Web sites and files shares to crawl.

As with other search applications, IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition permitted me to specify a starting URL and offered other controls, such as blocking the crawler from parts of a site. What's more, I specified login credentials for password-protected sites.

IBM and Yahoo provide very good control over the search experience. For instance, I easily adjusted the look of search and results pages. Furthermore, I effortlessly defined featured links, created synonyms lists, and adjusted rankings.

Performance all around was impressive. On my low-end Dell PowerEdge 1650 Pentium III server OmniFind indexed about 125 pages per minute and delivered results to users in under one-tenth of a second. On a larger server (a 3GHz Xeon processor with 2GB RAM is recommended), the software supports 500,000 documents. In any configuration, OmniFind recognizes more than 200 file types and documents in more than 30 languages.

End-users should be equally pleased. Search results default to your enterprise index. But here's the important Yahoo connection: The same query automatically applies to a Yahoo Web search (plus images, video, audio, directory, local, or news). While the search interface doesn't offer any advanced settings, they likely won't be missed. For instance, I experienced the expected automatic spell correction and entered queries with wildcard characters. The only feature I missed was that my search term wasn't highlighted in results.

IBM also documents how to use the open-source REST APIs to embed search results into other applications.

Some may argue that IBM and Yahoo just surround the underlying open source Lucene indexing core with a nice interface -- and want to hook you into upgrading to the advanced IBM OmniFind Enterprise products (which start at $18,750). I believe this perception doesn't credit the significant work that obviously went into developing the finished Yahoo Edition, which adapts a lot of features from IBM's other OmniFind engines. And it discounts the important benefit these companies are providing with a solid, simple (and supported) search solution that runs on enterprises' existing hardware.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition
Availability: Now
Pricing: Free download; optional enterprise support is $1,999 per server, per year.
Verdict: This entry-level enterprise search product eclipses the usability and delivers the highly relevant results of products costing thousands of dollars. Additionally, it integrates IBM enterprise search with Yahoo Internet results. Searching 500,000 documents per server (in 30 languages), plus providing easy administration, it's sure to find a home in many departmental and even larger enterprise search projects.

Posted by Mike Heck on December 13, 2006 12:10 PM

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