Mine is. Amazingly, it’s my favorite price for everything. I’m just funny that way.
That’s why I was excited to take on a new role in IBM a weeks ago. After eight years at ibm.com, I have a new job as a product manager for IBM’s OmniFind search products. I’ve been talking to the OmniFind team for several years, learning a lot from them and offering the occasional suggestion about their enterprise search products, OmniFind Enterprise Edition and OmniFind Discovery Edition, but when they asked me to join the team, they told me about a new product they were cooking up to go after the requirements of smaller businesses that can’t afford the time or expense to put a good search engine on their Web sites, their intranets, or their departmentmental servers. And today, we can announce a free search engine, in partnership with Yahoo!, called the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition.
The first thing you notice is that it’s free. (Did I mention that?) It’s not a trial. It’s free. Just register your e-mail address with us and download away.
The second thing you notice is that it’s not a toy. It handles up to 500,000 documents and provides excellent relevance, a configurable user interface, and many other features you’d expect in a search engine you plunk down thousands of dollars for. (If you need more than what this one does, then you can check out the other search engines that we sell.) This search engine can meet the needs of many sites.
But the main thing you’ll notice is that it is simple. It isn’t hard to install or configure and it just plain works. If you are running a huge Web site and have to customize every aspect of the search engine to satisfy your needs, this one is not for you. What you are doing is complex and it makes sense that setting things up might take some know-how. But if you have more modest needs, why not use something that doesn’t require a degree in searchology to make it work? This one’s for you.
I’ll be talking about this more as time goes on because it’s an interesting story. It’s interesting that the search engine is built on the powerful open source Lucene package. It’s interesting that IBM is contributing code back to the Lucene base. It’s interesting that IBM has a community approach to support and requests for enhancements.
But what’s really important are three things. It’s simple. It works. It’s free. Try it yourself and let me know what you think.
