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The truth is out there

Posted on 11 May 2007 at 11:57

Davey Winder searches for aliens in the enterprise while wondering whether anyone's listening when it comes to the AUP debate.

A press release from those otherwise perfectly sensible people at IBM informs me that the company has launched a search engine called UFOCrawler (www.ufocrawler.com) under the infinitively challenged slogan "helping to easily explore the unexplained". It was a month too early to be an April Fool's joke so, whistling the X-Files theme tune, I investigated further.

Online exploration of all things alien merely scratched the surface of the strange goings on at IBM. UFOCrawler itself managed to find 12 references to Andrew Lloyd-Webber, which compares poorly with Google's 1,410,000 hits. Something even more extraterrestrial, Alien Autopsy, mustered only 1,349 hits to Google's 923,000, with the significant difference that all UFOCrawler's sources were sites with domain names such as ufodigest.com, ufoevidence.com and ufoarea.com.

I didn't care much, because my attention had been grabbed by the fact that the site was powered by something called IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition (http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net). IBM OmniFind is an enterprise-level search tool (trekkies note, not that Enterprise) with a correspondingly cosmological price tag, but in partnership with Yahoo IBM has put together an entry-level product that isn't costly at all. In fact, it's free. I was rather expecting OmniFind Yahoo Edition to be a gimmick like UFOCrawler, and that just as the ET-finding engine had led me to the free enterprise search tool, so that free enterprise search tool would steer me toward some full-blown, long-trousered, deep-pocketed "proper" version. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that this wasn't the case, at least not for the small end of the enterprise space where I play.

There are indeed plenty of options that require an expensive upgrade, but smaller companies won't need any of these. There's a clear-cut division between versions, and it's highly unlikely that any company that needs the full solution would be tempted by the freebie. Not that OmniFind Yahoo Edition is underpowered or underperforming - far from it. In fact, you could argue that it provides real market competition for the Google Mini hardware in this sector.

Most SME outfits will be happy enough with the half-million document limit OmniFind Yahoo Edition can index, and the benefit of integrating your results with Yahoo's web searches isn't to be sneezed at. It won't be right for everyone, since it lacks support for indexing JPEG and MP3 files, for example, but the 200 or so file formats it does support should please most business users. This is definitely not a home user product, and you'd be well advised not to install it on a desktop PC, as it will consume every last drop of available resources while indexing in order to return speedy results - it demands to run on server-class hardware, which is fair enough. On the downside, it creates only a single index with no multiple index support.

Speaking of support, you'll have to cough up more than £1,000 per year, per server if you want any beyond the free web-based forums on offer. Remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch, but if you have the spare server capacity to devote to it IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition makes a decent free snack.

Joe Jobbing

Despite its suggestive name, there's nothing even vaguely sexual about the practice called Joe Jobbing. It gets its name from one of the first reported attacks, which was mounted against a chap called Joe Doll who ran a website known as Joe's CyberPost. Here's the typical Joe Jobbing scenario: a forum used for spamming was suspended, so the spammers retaliated by sending lots of spam with forged reply headers that made them appear to emanate from the entirely innocent Joe Doll. Quite apart from besmirching his reputation, the deluge of bounced messages and angry replies amounted to a full-scale Denial-of-Service attack and brought down his site.

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