Google warms up the other search market

GOOGLE IS SINKING a small chunk of its cash world into a new release of its Search Appliance.

The G-Men’s search server boxes have got about a squillionth of the coverage of more trendy areas of the firm’s business but, in its own way, this is a hot area.

The killer app in the new unit is the ability to search collated content management repositories. That means it can create an index of content stuffed away in silo systems from the big ECMs of Documentum, FileNet, Open Text and Microsoft SharePoint, when, like many firms in this mixed-up, crazy world, different IT buyers have chosen different and disparate vendors for their companies. So type in “paperclip supplier” just like the way you would in Google’s search window and the appliance will find all references in documents, no matter in which ECM they were stored.

What happens if you have a different ECM, like Vignette, Stellent, Interwoven or similar? Well, Google can issue the vendors with the API calls so they can join the party.

Enterprise search is also a target area for IBM which last year began offering a cut-down version of its OmniFind software as a freebie to tempt firms to try out, and then upgrade to the full-fat version.

But the dark horse in dredging the enterprise for jewels of information is Microsoft which, in an uncharacteristically low-key move is looking to the land of the Wanderers and Peter Kay for help. That’s Bolton, if you’re wondering what the heck I’m going on about. In Lancashire. That’s in England.

Microsoft earlier this year struck a deal with Scan Computers to make an appliance called Orange Spider, based on SharePoint, a gem of a product that often gets overlooked by Vole bashers. µ