Vendors offer free change of (search) engine

You would have to have had a long stretch in prison -– like a few former tech CEOs come to think of it -– to have missed the fact that search has emerged as a major software battleground over the last several years.

The vast majority of the buzz has been generated in the internet search consumer sector of course with early leaders such as Alta Vista (still going!) and Inktomi (later acquired by Yahoo) eventually being overhauled by the all-conquering Google. That story is engagingly told in John Battelle’s The Search, a book to be highly recommended for those still secretly puzzled about the inexorable rise of the G-men.

But the ability to search across the enterprise and value-chain partners is also becoming recognised as critical, hence the rise of free tools such as Google Desktop Search at the low end, and, further upscale, the release of the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini that have been quiet contributors to the firm’s sky-high revenues recently.

Slowly, some firms in the content management space are making their own moves.

Uncharacteristically perhaps, IBM has probably been the loudest and happiest to take risks. Its OmniFind Yahoo Edition is a free tool that can search and retrieve from a broad array of data sources and has a capacity of half a million documents. As the name suggests, it also uses a Yahoo front-end to make search a friendly, consumer-like experience rather than enforcing yet another arcane, proprietary front-end.

The early numbers suggest IBM is appealing to a broad constituency of firms and not just small ones. If you’re looking for the first time, or even for the nth time, at how you find those pesky files, it might be worth a try.

Microsoft is also at it, with plans to release a search appliance that promises a fast way to deploy its SharePoint Server, and of course, open-source products offer a risk-free way to trial services.

The surprise is that Open Text is rather quiet here, given how much it likes to remind us of its roots in search software.

Whether viewed as a software or hardware proposition, search is very hot and, for suppliers, a fast track into selling more wares further down the river. Look for more freebies, loss leaders and other tactics to lure you into changing the way you search.