IBM, OmniFind, Yahoo: What Is Next in Search?

March 8, 2011

I was pointed to this link from IBM’s website, stating that effective September 22, 2010 the Yahoo! Edition of OmniFind was withdrawn from marketing. Further, after June 30, 2011 the product support line will be nullified as well. Why the cancellation? There is an announcement letter attached, though it offers no insight. It does, however, indicate that no replacements will be made available. I tried tracking down some additional information on this free version of OmniFind and its demise, to no avail. So what happened? Was it not popular enough, too limited? Was it Lucene? Does anyone care? We do find IBM quite fascinating for a $100 billion company on Jeopardy, fighting crime in New York, and cracking medical problems with Nuance. Diverse for sure.

Our view is that with Microsoft getting cozy or at least semi-cozy with Yahoo, IBM’s OmniFind unit saw the writing on the wall. The result is that the “free” and severely limited IBM Yahoo search solution was pulled. What will take its place? Our first thought was Watson. Then we realized that Watson may be more appropriate for limited domain searching like medical information. The Jeopardy public relations stunt was a marketing play. Configuring Watson to replace Lucene based OmniFind is probably not a practical solution at this time. As a result, IBM will have to either create a new demo of its enterprise search software or just roll out the full system with some limit on its use.

In short, IBM like other big outfits seems to have some challenges in the enterprise search department just as Google, Microsoft, and Oracle do. No wonder the third party solutions are probing the enterprise for licensing deals. Stay tuned.

Sarah Rogers, March 8, 2011

Freebie

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Enterprise, Enterprise search, Management, News, Search, Technology, Text processing

Comments

2 Responses to “IBM, OmniFind, Yahoo: What Is Next in Search?”

fashion on March 8th, 2011 2:24 pm

yahoo give advanced searches and accurate searches in reliable time. this will make yahoo popular.
Charlie on March 14th, 2011 9:14 am

Watson was built from many things, but one of them was a Lucene-powered searchable index.

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.