IBM and Yahoo are teaming up to offer a free enterprise search tool likely to challenge Google's server appliances and similar alternatives that typically cost thousands of pounds.

Called IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition, the tool looks like Yahoo at the front end and can be installed on Windows or Linux intranet servers, web servers or general-purpose hosts. Enterprise data searches look and feel like Yahoo web searches but without advertising links, while the same tool can be used to search the web but will then show ads. Up to 500,000 documents or web pages can be indexed.

IBM sees the free release as a way to seed the market for more scalable products that can delve into even more pockets of firms' information stores.

"The ultimate goal is to sell more high-end software," said Marc Andrews, programme director for strategy at IBM's information management group. "It might start out with basic search but ultimately you need to be hooking into all enterprise capabilities including content management systems and databases."

Although the software will be available as a free download, IBM will charge for telephone support.

According to Mike Davis of analyst Ovum, OmniFind is aimed at the market targeted by Google's Search Appliance (GSA) and Mini, and Microsoft's Office 2007 SharePoint Server for Search. "We believe that this could be highly disruptive in the enterprise search space," he wrote in a research note. "A key selling point for the GSA is the use of the same search interface as used on the Google.com web site. By partnering with Yahoo, IBM has taken exactly the same approach."

Content management analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch pointed out that many people now want Google-like functionality on their desktop. "However, Google was designed to look for content that wants to be found [and] has been authored and tagged that way," Pelz-Sharpe added. "Enterprise search tools have a very different challenge looking for largely unstructured and very sparsely tagged content. In teaming up with Yahoo on this, IBM gives true enterprise search but with a look and familiarity that typical users will like."