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Have you ever been frustrated with your corporate portal search engine ? or worse still, been wondering why your company doesn’t offer any search engine for corporate information ? One of the excuses used by the IT department has always been cost, cost of software license being the main problem. Well, that excuse is no longer valid !
Whilst there are companies such as Autonomy which sells their enterprise search software for millions of dollars, there are plenty of FREE legitimate alternatives when it comes to enterprise search software now!
IBM has a huge portfolio when it comes to Enterprise Search which are all grouped within the OmniFind brand. From advanced enterprise search with text analytics capability to the freely available OmniFind Yahoo Edition. Truth be told, the freely available OmniFind Yahoo Edition software is actually based on the open source Apache Lucene code, however, IBM has put its weight behind it, packaged it for corporate use and offers basic support. It is super easy to get started and does do a good job against basic web based contents.
Whilst Google does sell it’s Google Search Appliance for a fee, The Google Custom Site Search product is a free custom search offering that allows you to index corporate portals and have it completely hosted by Google. The end user search experience is just like the Google consumer web offerings. You do also have the options to have a paid version if you want to remove the ads that comes with the free version can be able to do some basic customisation.
What’s the catch you ask. Even though web based consumer search has been free and will probably be free forever, there is always a price tag when it comes to enterprise software right ? In most cases, the free offerings is a platform that allows vendors to get themselves in door and try to upsell their premium offerings later on. Some of the main restriction of the free offerings are:
- Document index size limitation
- Document connector limitations: Type of documents, security features
- Advanced Functionalities
- Ability to customise the interface
- Ads displayed !
If you have a relatively small documentation repository that mainly consists of web pages and can live with the above limitations, then I would say the free offerings are a good fit for you or your company.
On top of the two I mentioned here, I am sure there are tones of other free offerings out there if you look hard enough. So go on, forward this article to your IT department and ask them to step up their game.
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