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IBM Businesses Google The Internet

Google And IBM Team Up Search Technology 72

Posted by Zonk from the only-good-can-come-of-this dept.
An Anonymous Reader wrote to mention a Reuters report on the teaming of IBM and Google over Google's Desktop search technology. From the article: "IBM is linking up its OmniFind corporate search system with Google's free desktop search for business to make it easier for users to locate information throughout an organisation that is often locked up in many separate systems ... Google wins IBM's endorsement among corporate technical managers for its desktop search product and IBM gives corporate information workers an already popular entry point into back-office databases through Google's search. Searchable data ranges from e-mail to computer files to blog postings to corporate repositories of data, images, audio or video, Prial said. Much of this is not available using public Web search tools. Typically, it is hard to reach inside a company except by trawling through many different programs."
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Google And IBM Team Up Search Technology More

Google And IBM Team Up Search Technology

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  • Why no mention of the Google Search Appliance? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Saturday October 29, 2005 @07:30PM (#13906653) Homepage
    Submitter (and the article) talks about merging Google Desktop Search [google.com] with IBM's Omnifind product. [ibm.com] Since it sounds like the purpose of this is to look inside the firewall/enterprise, I'm really surprised that the Google Search Appliance [google.com] wasn't mentioned. Wouldn't this be the logical product to internally spider a Corporate network and provide Search Engine Services? And since it was not mentioned, does this suggest some shortcomings with the GSA (which Google released a few years ago, but hasn't seemed to have done well) ... or is this announcement a way for Google and IBM to buddy-up to each other?

    X10 Halloween Webcam is online [komar.org] - is it a "Trick" or a "Treat" ... ;-)

    • Re:Why no mention of the Google Search Appliance? (Score:4, Informative)

      by erwin ( 8773 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @08:18PM (#13906791)
      my personal opinion is that the Google appliance is WAY too expensive, which is why enterprises haven't run to get on board with it. When we looked at it, as a small state agency, there was no way we could justify the cost.

      Rolling a semi-distributed solution out to everyone's desktop seems like it might (without know any details) be a cheaper way to do it. It's not like there aren't CPU cycles just going to waste there or anything....

      my $0.02
      • We paid a ONE TIME cost of $1500 for the Google appliance..... how is that way too expensive? Unless you're trying to start your own search engine company you'll be fine.
      • The mini has been very successful for many small-to-medium size business: Google Mini [google.com]
        And while the 1001 @ $30K is a bit more expensive, it has 5x the doc count, it has many more features... database crawl, feeds, multiple collections, secure doc crawl,etc.
      • On the contrary...the Google appliance is too cheap. IBM's OmniFind is competing with large enterprise search vendors--Verity, FAST, Autonomy, etc. In that space, the Google appliance ends up being more of a cute toy than real competition. It's great for small to medium businesses or for a quick implementation, but not for true enterprise search.

        I suspect this is more about hacking Google's desktop search client so it can hit an OmniFind-based backend.
    • It think it has to do with the different natures of those 2 products. The search appliance is a search engine over publically (over the company's lan anyway) accessible files, optimizing relevance of results over all users. On the other hand, desktop search is fine tuned to a particular user and his own files (not necessarily accessible over the network). So while both products hypothetically use the same algorithms (they probably share some common lineage) they focus on different problems and they really a

  • Yikes.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Saturday October 29, 2005 @07:42PM (#13906688) Homepage Journal

    I rirst read that as "Google and IBM Team Up with Scientology".

    Go Xenu!

  • But will they like what they find? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @07:43PM (#13906690) Journal
    It occurs to me that setting up this powerful of a search tool throughout the typical business means at least initially, people are going to dredge up all sorts of unexpected and perhaps unwanted things. (Say, just for example, a middle manager is working on plans for giving out raises or pay cuts for the next year. He might have an Excel or Word document or two out on a shared network drive mentioning some of his rough drafts for the idea. Bad idea of course, because he should be saving that stuff in a more secure place - but you know how things go. Might have even saved a version of a file there completely by accident? Traditionally, it would go unnoticed in most cases. But what if another employee is playing with the search tools, looking for all documents related to salary - and finds out what all of his co-workers are going to get paid next year?)

    It'll only take one or two such incidents before management will demand removal or a serious lock-down of people's ability to use the search tools.

    Also, think of the shock some people might get when their boss starts searching the contents of everyone's corporate email for key phrases. Once again, sure - we all get the general idea that "business email is not private", but how many of us took what seemed to be an infinitely small risk and made a couple off-color jokes, jabs at management, or other such things in an outgoing email written to a buddy over lunch break or something? Did you remember to make sure all that stuff was removed from your "sent items" or "deleted items" folders?
    • Exactly what I thought. Bad bad idea.
    • IBM however does require help with its current search for all the information contained on its websites. Countless times I resorted to using Google to search the IBM websites to get the information I require. IBMs search was just too poor, with all the irrelevant results at the top of the and the info I wanted just not found or pages and pages away.

      Getting only 10 search results a page has always annoyed me to heck!

    • Re:But will they like what they find? (Score:5, Informative)

      by BigGerman ( 541312 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @08:05PM (#13906759)
      You are absolutely right on this. I participated in developing of a competing product (see my sig, they are good people and deserve a plug) and I remember that our spidering tools were getting stuff that definitely noone wanted to see public, like list of passwords from a backup CD, metadata (author, etc) from Office docs, unencrypted credit cards from databases, etc.

      The solution is to educate people that "shared drive" is indeed shared and provide a separate network share for backups, etc, and make sure that share is not configured to be searchable.

      • So, there is no requirement on users to actually protect their "sensitive" data?
        I think it's time to stop using sysadmins and fallable network shares to maintain user level security. If, for example, a middle manager wants to tweak the payscale, that manager should have a plan in place to secure the working documents. We should all remember that placing data on any networked system is inherently insecure. It must be so to allow the most basic functionality of the network-to share data.
      • This is the common challenge with implementing Intranet search. Initially my clients aks for full security on all of their content but once they realise that this tends to involve HLA (Hit-level Authentication) they then restrict the spider to truely 'public' areas.

        Sig? What Sig?

  • Article Title (Score:4, Funny)

    by dotslashdot ( 694478 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @07:49PM (#13906709)
    "Google to help IBM search for more business."

  • It could be a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @07:52PM (#13906717) Journal
    This could be a good thing. The GSA does well for registered websites, but I'm not sure what it will do for standard files. If searchable files on the local machines have to be tagged as searchable by the user, and not done by default, then anyone can publish information to the companies repository of information without having access to a website, or needing to get the document published, just tag the document with a couple of keywords or some such, and off it goes to the internal wiki... or something like that anyway. That could be a very good collaboration tool, despite my poor explanation.

    By having to purposely publish a document, the default is that your data is not published, thus allowing you to email your family without fear of publishing the holiday party plans at your mom's house.

    Likewise, all those involved with a project can publish to that project's wiki without serious effort, just right-click and select the keywords etc. or something like that anyway.

  • Steady now! (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by cycletronic ( 918616 )
    Google really seems on top of this taking-over-Microsoft thing. Microsoft has openly decreed that they want the search space back, and Google answers by strengthening the front.
    • 'back'? When did Microsoft ever have the search space? It's just another case of tech-envy and strong arm attempts at market takeover by trying to leverage their pc advantage, just like they always do, playing catch-up (like they did with gui windowing, internetworking, media, etc).

  • Web search for IBM with Google! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bubulubugoth ( 896803 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @08:12PM (#13906780) Homepage
    THe IBM site es HUGE... really, really huge, and trying to find something specific is very hard, usng the search tool provided by IBM.

    For example, trying to get to the Java JRE 1.4 for PPC 32 bits, to use at my IBOOK, is much more easier with google than ibm own serch engine.

    Also, my last painfully search at IBM, looking for development information for their JPOS implementation, was almost impossible with IBM serch engine, but using google, wasnt so much..

    Really IBM should hire or use the google services...Maybe this is a beggining... And IBM partering with Google, one more thing to worry about for Microsoft.

    IBM lately, with porting a lot of apps to Linux, is showing a remarked "low profile" hostility to M$..

    They are a lot of benefits if you switch from MS to Linux at IBM products...

  • I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fahrvergnuugen ( 700293 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @08:20PM (#13906794) Homepage
    I wonder if this means we'll be able to buy a google search appliance that can index Lotus Notes databases in the future. I work for a company that has spent the last 15 years throwing information into lotus notes. We now have several thousand notes "databases" and no one can find anything. It's a complete mess.
    • I wonder if this means we'll be able to buy a google search appliance that can index Lotus Notes databases in the future.

      It's got a start. The enterprise version [google.com] of Google desktop can index Lotus Notes mail databases. I've used this and it's excellent. Much faster and more accurate than the search facility built into Notes.

    • Ah yes, I remember that well. We didn't get to thousands, but my previous employer had hundreds of Notes databases. Everytime a new manager or developer with ideas arrived they would ignore existing databases and create new ones. I guess it's just an extension of standard IT behaviour, but Notes seems to make it worse somehow.

      I used to go on a mission finding databases that were used a little bit or not at all and combine the useful stuff into a few common databases. After a while we got to the point where
    • I am not sure what their corporate package will set you back, but these guys over at The Brain [thebrain.com] have a very nifty tool which did search Notes Databases the last time I gave it a shot.
    • autonomy.com
      They can search into Lotus Notes databases, with security and so on.
      HTH.
  • The result of that IBM research into finding contextual links between documents? Or some other search technology?

  • Search as dialog (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @09:19PM (#13906966)
    The core challenge is that search is not a function, but a dialog. Currently, Google lacks the kind of interactive refinement of searches that would really help people find what they want. If I search on Apple, Google doesn't know whether I mean Apple (the fruit), Apple Macintosh (the computer), Apple Macintosh (the fruit, again), Apple (Fiona, the singer), Apple (Big = New York City), etc. The first page of hits for a search on "Apple" should offer one each of these various meanings -- something like this search for Apple at Clusty [clusty.com] which is good, but doesn't take the concept far enough.

    Even if the search engine knows that I want Apple Macintosh (the computer), Google still doesn't know if I want pages that describe hardware, software, peripherals, the company's site, old 68k Macintoshes, new machines, stuff for sale, fan sites, technical support, etc. Yes, I can add more search terms, but adding terms has two great problems. First, added terms often end up throwing away the very pages that I seek if the page doesn't contain the words I use (e.g., a search on Apple Macintosh misses all the sites that just call the computer "Mac"). Second, I may not even know what terms to use or how to spell them, but like pornography I'll know good search hits when I see them.

    What would help is some interactive process that directly asks or deduces whether the search hits are on target or not. The second page of hits would differ depending on how the searcher interacts with the first page -- giving the user more or fewer of pages similar to those they liked or didn't like respectively.

    Search should be more like a game of "hot-n-cold" in which the searcher can easily tell the search engine which hits are "warmer" (more on target) or "cooler" (less on target).

    • If you actually search for "Apple" in Google, you're not a very good search user. In all likelihood, you'd refine the search as there's no way for the search engine to give you what you want with any high degree of certainty.

      One of the ways around this however, is the Flickr cluster system. Try this search, for example, for apple [flickr.com]. Flickr makes little groupings of photos with similar tags and puts them into dynamic groups based on similarities in tagging of content.

      Ironically, your categories are three of

    • Re:Search as dialog (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      people cannot possibly get any lazier. say you are looking for apple the fruit, then just fucking type "fruit apple" and if it doesn't get you anywhere, just try a few more keyword combinations. that isn't hard.

      google is already too easy. we could've stopped at yahoo... maybe it would have kept a bit more lusers (now they're called bloggers, same concept) out of teh internet

      go ahead, mod me -1 and make my day
      • "people cannot possibly get any lazier. say you are looking for apple the fruit, then just fucking type "fruit apple" and if it doesn't get you anywhere, just try a few more keyword combinations. that isn't hard."

        Thanks for making my point on two levels. First, a search of the term "fruit apple" (just the two words, not the phrase) discards about 3/4 of all pages dealing with apples (the fruit). The vast majority of pages that mention this fruit do not have the word "fruit" on them (this is a very commo

    • Well, with Google search history feature, there getting there, and the "advanced" tools in search allow you to use logical operators to include both Mac and Macintosh in your search. So it may take some extra searches. If you know how a search engine works, you can almost always find the content you want (if it exists) rather quickly.

      For the general public, this advanced features of refining your search as you have mentioned might be nice, but has two problems. (1) It throws out other searches that we m

    • Suggest you learn about the extra little "features and hacks" google has to offer. In actuality you can search by various different methods, date, only search on site, location, and all with just a few keywords. The different "search types" on google are not really different at all, i figure google just takes the stress of adding teh keywords. And one thing you do not realize is where you are looking. I know that when i search i get as specific as possible because "apple" will only leave me with millions
    • What you want is Scatter/Gather [berkeley.edu], a procedure defined in a scientific paper about 15 years ago. This is a clustering . If it hasnt been implemented yet to industrial scale, its probably because the computing requirements of a system like that are unmanageable.

  • Niave Question: What does IBM do? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LionKimbro ( 200000 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @09:22PM (#13906975) Homepage
    In 1988, if you asked me what IBM does, I would say, "They make computers."

    Because, while my mom owned a Compaq, my friend had an IBM at his house.

    Now, it's 2005, and I find myself asking: "Just what exactly does IBM do do?"

    Joel tells me that they make clear plastic telephones. One of my bosses say they provide "business solutions." This post seems to imply that they have something to do with search. Their website is indecypherable to me.

    So, please, if someone could explain to me in plain language: What is IBM, and what does it do?

    I'm aware of what Wikipedia says, [wikipedia.org] but I'm interested in hearing what juicy nuggets local Slashdot readers may have to offer.

    • Re:Niave Question: What does IBM do? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Primarily, IBM sells hardware, software, and services to business. It's still a huge company and has re-invented itself over the past 20 years.

      H/W

      Servers: PSeries (Linux/AIX), XSeries (Windows/Linux), ZSeries (Mainframe/Unix/Linux), ISeries (AS/400)

      They no longer sell PCs/Laptops - that has been sold off to Lenovo.

      S/W Brands

      Rational:
      Software Development
      Lotus:
      Content/Knowledge Management/Portal/...
      Websphere:
      Integration/App Servers/Middlewar
    • To be way too concise - they make/upgrade large computing systems for large businness and corporations. I recall working for the city of Los Angeles and was told by my boss to attend a meeting where a new city wide inventory system would be unvailed to replace the antiquated IBM system. When nothing of substance was unvailed by the vendor I had the "this anit good" feeling about this creawing up the back of my neck. Anyway the whole thing ended as a fiasco woth 7 million dollers of taxpayer money flushed
    • IBM has, since the 1960s, made BIG, reliable, high-IO computers. But, more than that, IBM sold all the peripherals, software, maintenance, consulting, widgets and sprockets that go with BIG computers. Until ~1993, IBM really wanted nothing more than to sell that S/390 mainframe and EVERYTHING to go with it. At around that point, IBM realized that 1) Customers didn't necessarily like buying absolutely everything from IBM 2) IBM's stuff didn't really work with anything else (not "open") 3)Customers wanted

    • BPO. (Score:2)

      by mparaz ( 31980 )
      In these parts, it's business process outsourcing [pinoytechblog.com]. More than anything, that's what affects our economy.

      So if it helps people search for jobs, that's a win.

    • Re:Niave Question: What does IBM do? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jiushao ( 898575 ) on Sunday October 30, 2005 @05:35AM (#13908221)
      Well, one thing they do that is particularly interesting here is making money off patented research. The example that might be very relevant is that they have a patent on so-called hub/authority-ranking.

      Hub/authority-ranking was invented about the same time as PageRank by Jon Kleinberg, a very simple overview is that for each search the method will assign hub and authority scores to the found pages. A page gets hub score for linking to authoritive pages, and an authority score is given by getting linked from hubs. This is of course a recursive definition, the results are approximately calculated by some nice matrix trickery. Any pages that don't contain the search terms but get a lot of authority are also included in the set.

      The nice thing about this method is that it deals well with smaller communities and concepts, where a search for Java with PageRank (and thus Google) will go on and on about the programming language the hub/authorities ranking will have a better chance to pick out a separate set of results for the island and present a few hubs and authorities for each at the top of the results. PageRank fails this kind of things horribly since Java the language has such an incredible pagerank. It also does a lot better for sources that might not refer to the terms searched for directly, Google does this to a very small extent by adding the link text to the set of terms on a page, but the hubs/authorities method gets way better results.

      The downside is that the matrix calculation has to be done for each search with hub/authorities whereas Google precalculates PageRank for all pages every few months.

      So, this sure seems like a somewhat relevant nugget of information here :)

    • Expensive enterprise consulting. They've moved up the stack from hardware to OS to software and development tools up to consulting. Now they will "solve your business problems" by sending in expensive J2EE consultants.

      Banks love this kind of thing, they can't waste enough money just by paying contractors (rather than fulltime employees), so instead they pay IBM oodles of cash to borrow their software developers and consultants.

      I haven't quite worked out why, possibly so the middle managers in the banks have
    • Just to put in my 2 cents. What IBM does is keep the financial sector operating. They are so firmly entrenched in practically every financial institute in the world that save from collapse of the entire financial sector (and thus the end of commerce) they are here to stay. What they do? They allow the financial institutes to pay them money to keep operating. Not a bad position at all.

    • If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
  • They need to diversify. Having just one source of income is never a good idea.

  • I B Machines? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday October 29, 2005 @10:40PM (#13907190) Homepage Journal
    We see now the genius of IBM's rise in tech sales. Who could resist buying the same best stuff any other salespeople sell you, if IBM sold it to you? And who better than IBM to tell you they understand what tech does what your company is working on, and what you'll need further down the road? Why sell IBM hard drives, computers or any other stuff that can break and make the customer think of a competitor to IBM? IBM can make money selling Google's system, integrated with IBM's own software or bundles of other vendors' software? As long as IBM is careful not to create competition for IBM's own brands that locks IBM out of a sales channel, like it did before with Microsoft, it can be everything to everyone. At the most powerful and lucrative point in the supply chain: at the customer.
  • From TFA:

    IBM customers can use the Google-IBM search combination by buying IBM products and services and building their own in-house system or rely on IBM to create a pre-packaged system, tailored to the company's industry, the company said.

    Does IBM websphere licensing or IBM Global Services even look at any any accounts under seven figures? (not sure, maybe they go as low as six figures) Seems like this would most likely be an incremental thing sold to existing websphere accounts--I can't see anyon

  • Novell to be next? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dana340 ( 914286 ) on Sunday October 30, 2005 @12:30AM (#13907517)
    On an earlier Google article, I discussed what Google might be planning next. Full thread here [slashdot.org], my reply here [slashdot.org]. And this adds fuel to that fire. Google and IBM is a more than worthy foe to compete with Micro$oft. Let me share my vision.

    Google buys out Novell, and takes SuSE Linux. Although they have their own specialized search appliances, SuSE would allow business administrators to have some level of control over an IBM/Google supplied server. Why? An IBM/Google based computing system. Imagine, your business uses applications, such as Google office, Google bookkeeping, scheduling, and so on and so forth in one office, or with all of your traveling sales reps. Web based, your system no longer would require VPN access for users to work away from the office.

    What's more is, workstations can be made to be nothing more than a glorified web surfing machine for the basic business user. No ability to install applications on a local machine, and therefore no issues with spyware. It would help to combat viruses too. Simplifying IT for the many companies. And lowering costs as compared to a windows based infrastructure.

    Google likely would lease equipment and services to businesses. Small businesses would only need an internet connection really. Lease Google equipment and pay monthly, no assets to pay taxes on, and monthly revenue for Google, and they would start with the Novell/ SuSE market share under their belt.

    Please remember it's still only speculation, but I'm confident enough to get some shares in Novell. Interestingly enough, while talking about this to the other geeks up here, someone mentioned this, a worthy watch. (I saw this after I came up with my theory) Epic2014 [idorosen.com]

  • Now Microsoft has a real reason to worry about Google.
    • Microsoft has to worry about Google? Why, because Google makes money off of ad revenue? And, er, ad revenue? Microsoft is a giant with its hands in a LOT of things. A lot of very PROFITABLE things. So far, Google has shown no real way of even sustaining itself. I'm not saying it won't happen, but it certainly hasn't yet. Honestly though, things like Linux and FOSS are FAR more thretening to Microsoft, and even that is a huge longshot. Microsoft is a giant, and the only thing going to bring down Microsoft is

  • Oh...No...Spock! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Alpha_Traveller ( 685367 ) * on Sunday October 30, 2005 @02:09AM (#13907802) Homepage Journal
    Must...Figure...out...why.... desktop...search...not....working...must...call... .i...b....m.....
  • Ever tried to find something in IBM WebSphere's InfoCenter with the internal search system? Good thing the InfoCenter is on the Web. The other day I spoke to an IBM engineer and he admitted, he never finds something with the InfoCenter search system and he also uses Google to search the WebSphere documentation. :)

    On the other hand, it becomes a bit scary. We say, we "google" for information instead of we "search" for information. Where "to google" means you actually expect to find something useful (in the "
    • IBM's site is a nightmare. I'm glad Google teamed up with them. Now we can use Google hacks to find out all the important shit about AIX that we'd ever need. On a side note, Microsoft teams up with Apple to create new interface to piss off Google and IBM. Kid gets assassinated for making a 'Working Windows' virus. More news at 11.
  • I started deploying X1 http://www.x1.com/ [x1.com] in a small company where I do the IT service and it beats every other desktop search appliance I tested. I haven't found one necessary file type it doesn't index and the reaction time is usually 1 second. I can't tell how well it works in larger network but for small companies it's really worth testing. I think the company will have their ROI in 4-8 weeks.

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