Google, IBM Team on Enterprise Search

IBM ( - ) and Google ( - ) announced plans to integrate their enterprise-search technologies to give corporate customers more power in mining their databases, documents, and e-mail.

According to the announcement, IBM will develop a new plug-in for Google Desktop for Enterprise, a free application designed to help employees sort through multiple types of information.

IBM already has a corporate search product called OmniFind, but it is limited in terms of what type of data can be scanned. Because Google Desktop for Enterprise creates an index of everything on a hard drive and a corporate network, it is much more effective for doing searches across a company's information stores.

High Demand

The need for enterprise search is getting more acute as business environments become increasingly digital and complex, said Yankee Group analyst Patrick Mahoney.

"As data is created, there certainly has to be a way to search across it to bring up relevant information," he said. "The standard way in the past was by keyword, but with multiple applications, files, and databases, that just doesn't work anymore."

What enterprises will have to integrate are systems such as those created by the IBM and Google partnership, which can do "smarter" searches, Mahoney noted.

"Search is going to be seen as an area where companies need to make an investment in the near future," he said. "That's going to drive the market, and we'll see more partnerships and feature enhancements because of it."

Search and Discover

IBM, in particular, has been keen to boost its efforts in terms of search. In August, the company released an application that finds information by looking at the text within Web pages and e-mail, as well as data, by examining the meaning of words.

The company has noted that it is interested in helping companies sort through unstructured information such as e-mail, which makes up about 85 percent of all data in a company.

Google, meanwhile, has been ramping up its efforts to get into more enterprises through its desktop-search application, as well as through its enterprise-search appliance that is able to do much more extensive intranet and data searches.

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