ICentera, a Minnesota vendor that provides on-demand Web portals for business-to-business communication and collaboration, is using IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition both to search its own intranet and to enhance the portals it provides for its clients.

ICentera was able to query its intranet within a half-hour of deploying the product, and it took less than 30 days of engineering to make sure the IBM product fit seamlessly with the iCentera product, says president and CEO Craig Nelson.

Support for foreign languages will make the product more attractive for iCentera customers, he says.

"If you take a look at our clients, they're communicating with companies around the world. They'll localize these portals," he says.

The free Yahoo edition offers support for up to 500,000 documents per server. ICentera may end up using the fee-based version in addition to the free one because some of its customers may need to search a larger number of documents, Nelson says.

The enterprise search market is a busy one featuring vendors such as FAST, Autonomy, and Oracle.

"If you look at the marketplace, there is a general trend toward making better search technology available at lower price points," Brown says. "What we (at IBM) did when we brought out this product was move to try to accelerate that and really grow the market."

By 2008, Gartner thinks Google will own 40 percent of the unit licenses in the enterprise search market, between the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini , Andrews says.

The Google Search Appliance is on the low end of the price spectrum, costing about US$30,000 for two years, he says.

But customers have many options for enterprise search, he notes. The field has a number of small vendors who make good, inexpensive products, including dtSearch, Coveo, Zylab, Isys, and Thunderstone, he says.