I recently interviewed with IBM. While speaking with someone in the IBM web page management team, I learned that IBM has millions of available web pages. There are so many, in fact, that they don’t even know what most of them are or what they do. Furthermore, the best way to count the number of pages is to let Google do it for them. Apparently Google is better at counting IBM web pages than IBM’s own search engine.
Naturally I was amused by the following news:
IBM Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are teaming up to offer a free data-search tool for businesses, a quirky move challenging Google Inc. and other corporate-search specialists in a blossoming market.
IBM already sells a business-focused search product, OmniFind, that lets organizations comb through internal documents. This free new edition of OmniFind will be limited in the number of documents it can query, but it will combine the results with Web searches powered by Yahoo.
