In competition to Google’s Mini device, IBM and Yahoo have today launched their upgraded enterprise search solution; OmniFind. Whereas Google is offering an integrated hardware and software approach at a cost, OmniFind is a software only free solution.  Capable of searching 500,000 documents, OmniFind offers real competition to Google Mini which, with not such a mini price tag, can only search a maximum of 300,000 documents for $8,995!

Both the Google Mini and the IBM-Yahoo search engines are aimed at the entry level market and can be utilised for internal and external search across intranets, company databases, public websites and network files. To interact with OmniFind, users have a special browser based search page or the search box can be integrated within an existing webpage. The search page can also be customised by changing fonts, colours, logos and text to match your own branding.

I downloaded a copy of IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition to find out if it’s as good as they say it is! Initially, I have just installed it locally on my Windows PC (there is also a Linux version). It installed very quickly and easily with only the usual changes required to my firewall software. Now I have a smart looking blue OmniFind Administration Console to play with!

The graphical interface is very user friendly, with options down the left hand side that allow you to crawl websites, crawl files, manage the search experience and the system.

I set the crawlers off on Commercetuned and, even though it is not a massive website, they found all of the pages within a few seconds. Once you have crawled and indexed your documents, you can begin searching using the search page. This looks like Yahoo’s usual search box, except very simplified without all the other “portal” information that I think clutters their home page. You can personalise this page anyway, so if you don’t like it or want to put your own logo on - no problem.

The results for a few simple searches, like “Search Engine Optimisation” and “Social Bookmarking” display the pages we specifically created to be themed around those keywords in position number one - so it seems quite relevant. As it is, there is a utility that allows you to manage the search experience by tweaking the following:

1. Define synonyms - here you can link different words with the same meaning. This helps if you discover that users are not finding the most relevant documents as those documents use different words to those words used in their queries.
2. Define featured links - this is very similar to having sponsored listings at the top of your search results. By defining featured links you can help users find a specific page or document more quickly by adding a featured link that sits at the top of the search results and looks different to the other results.
3. Tune Results by adjusting ranking (I wish I could do this in Google!) - You can do a number of useful tweaks in this area, namely adjusting the results by date modified, URL path (i.e. pages closer to the root are more relevant) and also by analysing weblinks which seems to work quite like Page Rank.

OmniFind also offers data and statistics on all queries carried out; this includes keywords, number of results returned, response time and so on. This will be useful when you are tuning search results to find out what language your customer’s are using and also if they are seeing the results you want them to.

I am going to play around with OmniFind over the course of this week and see what else it can do, but having given it this brief review, I can see that IBM-Yahoo have created a really useful tool. It is free, easy to install and use and can be customised. Try it out and see how it can help you!