IBM and Yahoo shake hands, challenge Google

IBM and Yahoo announced they would work together to provide a free data search tool for businesses.

" Cooperative handshake " between IBM and Yahoo is evaluated by experts as a huge challenge for Google as well as a number of firms specializing in the field of enterprise data search.

IBM itself is currently trading a product that looks for its own business data. IBM OmniFind allows businesses to search and search documents in the intranet.

In collaboration with Yahoo, IBM will release a free version of OmniFind but limited to the amount of text it can search for. However, the free version is integrated with Yahoo's web search results.

The free OmniFind version has officially launched users yesterday (December 13). IBM and Yahoo hope the cooperation between the two companies will contribute to furthering the development of business search, which is dominated by Google, Autonomy and FAST .

Google has long held a market position in search of low-end businesses. The search engine versions of this firm often cost between $ 2,000 and $ 30,000. In particular, the highest priced version is also limited to the number of searchable documents - about 500,000. This number is equivalent to the limited number of free OmnFind versions of Yahoo and IBM.

"The collaboration of Yahoo and IBM will be a headache for Google," said Matthew Brown, a researcher for Forrester Research.

Hoang Dung