Traditional technology vendors want to pushGoogle out of the workplace

Google is, by far, the world's most widely used search engine. But that doesn't automatically make it a good business tool.

“Google works well on the World Wide Web because it bases a document's relevancy on how often it's referenced by other people,” says Jim Murphy, a director with Boston-based AMR Research. “That's kind of a popularity contest, and it works great if you're trying to bring consumers to advertisers. It doesn't work as well for a company that wants its people to consistently get the latest—and correct—documents related to a given topic.”

IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle seem to agree with Murphy on this point, which explains why they are introducing these search tools aimed at business users:

• OmniFind Yahoo! Edition from IBM,
• Secure Enterprise Search 10g from Oracle, and
• SharePoint Server 2007 for Search from Microsoft.

These vendors claim they are giving business users the best of both worlds when it comes to search: a tool that consistently serves up truly relevant information while also being easy to use. The information is consistently relevant, the vendors contend, because they understand what business users—not casual Internet surfers—want from a search engine.

Referencing the need to organize all the information that can flow through the enterprise, Greg Crider, Oracle's senior director of product marketing, says, “There's an explosion in the number of potential sources of information. Think of manufacturers with a lot of distributed manufacturing processes: They're not only looking at information coming from within their systems, but at information they may need from—and share with—their partners.”

While getting to the right information is a business user's chief goal, Crider says these users—given their exposure to consumer-focused search engines like Google—expect all search tools to be easy to use.

“They see that they can search the Internet and within a few seconds find hundreds of links to pages on almost any topic, so they believe they should be able to go to work—where they're spending millions of dollars on information systems—and have essentially the same experience,” says Crider.

A search tool that serves up the same information to a CFO that it does to a factory worker is not only inefficient, but dangerous.

Says Crider, “Security is the one area in which search needs to be different for a business. That's security in terms of understanding what information sources should have restricted access, and catering to the business roles defined in most organizations.”

An emphasis on security is at the heart of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, Release 10.1.8, which became available in February. Oracle bills this as a major upgrade to the search engine it initially unveiled in early 2006. New features include support for securely searching a broad range of third-party data sources, and integration with Oracle Applications. The tool returns search results based on each user's role, as defined by the organization's own identity management directory.

Ease of use is the key selling point for IBM's latest search solution, OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, which debuted last December. This tool, which is available as a free download, is the result of collaboration between IBM and Yahoo! It combines IBM enterprise search technology with the Yahoo! interface and Web search capabilities.

“Companies want to apply Web-oriented search capabilities to their enterprises,” says Marc Andrews, IBM's manager of information management strategy. “Traditional enterprise search solutions have been fairly complex to deploy. We wanted to provide an on-ramp for organizations to take advantage of these search capabilities more easily.”

OmniFind Yahoo! Edition—designed as an enterprise search starter kit—only supports up to 500,000 documents per server, and is suited for searching unstructured data—the free-text information found in word processing documents, presentations, email, and images.

The ability to search more structured data repositories—and larger numbers of documents—comes with various versions of IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition, which users must purchase. Those products work with IBM's own Lotus Domino and WebSphere portal interfaces. But Andrews says OmniFind Yahoo! Edition users will find the transition to the Enterprise editions easy. “We actually provide the ability to extend to these more complex solutions,” he says.

IBM expects companies to eventually use its solutions as more than simple search tools. “Search is just a starting point,” Andrews says. “Ultimately what organizations are seeking is a way to better leverage the information they have.”

Simon Floyd, a worldwide industry technology strategist for product life-cycle management at Microsoft, echoes that sentiment. “We think about it as being an issue of finding information, and knowing how to use—or reuse—that information.

“We tend to view this issue more holistically,” Floyd continues. “We ask, 'Why are you [adopting a search tool]; what do you really want to do?' And they'll say, 'We know there are enormous amounts of intellectual property sitting in our organization, and we'd like to be able to reuse it.' ”

Floyd says the idea of making information widely available for reuse led Microsoft to combine its enterprise search functionality with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which essentially serves as a collaboration engine.

“SharePoint makes perfect sense for us to offer as a product because it's so strong at collaboration,” Floyd explains. “For us, it's not just about finding [information]—it's about being able to share it properly so that people can reuse it, or learn from it.”