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Google And IBM Team Up Search Technology

Posted by Zonk on from the only-good-can-come-of-this dept.

An Anonymous Reader wrote to mention a Reuters report on the teaming of IBM and Google over Google's Desktop search technology. From the article: "IBM is linking up its OmniFind corporate search system with Google's free desktop search for business to make it easier for users to locate information throughout an organisation that is often locked up in many separate systems ... Google wins IBM's endorsement among corporate technical managers for its desktop search product and IBM gives corporate information workers an already popular entry point into back-office databases through Google's search. Searchable data ranges from e-mail to computer files to blog postings to corporate repositories of data, images, audio or video, Prial said. Much of this is not available using public Web search tools. Typically, it is hard to reach inside a company except by trawling through many different programs."

3 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But will they like what they find? by BigGerman · · Score: 4, Informative
    You are absolutely right on this. I participated in developing of a competing product (see my sig, they are good people and deserve a plug) and I remember that our spidering tools were getting stuff that definitely noone wanted to see public, like list of passwords from a backup CD, metadata (author, etc) from Office docs, unencrypted credit cards from databases, etc.

    The solution is to educate people that "shared drive" is indeed shared and provide a separate network share for backups, etc, and make sure that share is not configured to be searchable.

  2. Re:Why no mention of the Google Search Appliance? by erwin · · Score: 4, Informative

    my personal opinion is that the Google appliance is WAY too expensive, which is why enterprises haven't run to get on board with it. When we looked at it, as a small state agency, there was no way we could justify the cost.

    Rolling a semi-distributed solution out to everyone's desktop seems like it might (without know any details) be a cheaper way to do it. It's not like there aren't CPU cycles just going to waste there or anything....

    my $0.02

  3. Re:Niave Question: What does IBM do? by mpcooke3 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Expensive enterprise consulting. They've moved up the stack from hardware to OS to software and development tools up to consulting. Now they will "solve your business problems" by sending in expensive J2EE consultants.

    Banks love this kind of thing, they can't waste enough money just by paying contractors (rather than fulltime employees), so instead they pay IBM oodles of cash to borrow their software developers and consultants.

    I haven't quite worked out why, possibly so the middle managers in the banks have someone else to blame when the project isn't completed 2 years later.