IBM and Yahoo Team Up to Launch Free Enterprise Search Product

IBM with Yahoo launched a new, free enterprise search product. This product is particularly aimed at mid-sized businesses (or even large enterprises!). This new product named as IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is perhaps the first product from Yahoo(and IBM) which is considered as a serious threat to Google.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition has been designed to be simple to install and use, and can index up to 500,000 documents from more than 200 file types, like Adobe Systems’ PDF and Microsoft’s Word and Excel. This search application is available for Linux or Windows servers. Also this application can be customized and tuned to enterprise needs and supports more than 30 languages.

The look and feel of search results will be much similar Yahoo's search results but without any ads. But the search results contain links to Yahoo thus bolstering the company's search traffic.

On the other hand Google might be closely watching this new application. Google already has an enterprise application called as "Google Mini" but comes with a cost of $1,995 (including hardware) that indexes upto 50,000 documents and a more sophisticated tool at $8,995, which can index upto 300,000 documents.

Create Your Highly Specialized Custom Search Engine With Google Co-op

Thanks to Google. Now we too can create our own search engine which reflects our interests. With Google's Custom Search Engine under Google Co-op, we no longer require to search the entire web. We can create our own search index (list of sites to be searched). Also we can change the look and feel of our search engine.

Google's Custom Search is "free," but comes with AdSense(ads) alongside search results. That requirement is exempted for governments, non-profits and educational institutions. Perhaps the most basic and obvious aspect of this is that it potentially creates more AdSense inventory for Google.

Two important twists

• The original creator of a search engine can allow anyone or selected colleagues, friends or community members to contribute to his index (sites to be searche). For example if I create a new search engine on "Conference Call Services" and I want my friends to contribute new sites to my index I can ask them to do so by sending them invitations.
  
• We can also make money with our Custom Search Engine by connecting it with a Google AdSense account. We make money when users click on an ad they see in our search results. If we have more than one Custom Search Engine, all of our search engines will automatically be associated with the same AdSense account.
  

Will Google Loose Out to Guruji.com in Indian Local Search Market ?

Guruji,a new search engine in India will soon become a threat to Google in Local Search Market.Guruji is quite fast and the search results are quite convincing.The results are more relevant compared to Google.

Guruji.com has simple interface.User can search entire India or can limit his search to his city by including the city name as a keyword in the search(select city tab for better results).Thought Garage has a very interesting post about Guruji's local search results.

Below are the screens of both Guruji and Google when I searched for "icici bank" branches in Hyderabad(a city in India).

Guruji


Google

Clearly the results of Guruji are far better when compared to Google.Guruji provides me with the address as well as telephone numbers just like Yellow Pages.