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IBM and Yahoo! Inc. have partnered to compete with Google Inc. in the search market. Yahoo! had joined with IBM to announce a free search product designed for small and midsize businesses. The real target of the endeavor, say industry observers, is the Google Search Appliance, an enterprise search offering. IBM is offering the OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, which will be able to search 500,000 documents per server and over 200 file types in more than 300 languages. The Google product has more capacity, since it can search as many as 30 million documents. Google charges for its product. The product offered by Yahoo! and IBM is free. This is not a major change for Yahoo!, which already provides a search engine to its customers at no charge, but it represents a major shift for IBM, which generally generates revenue by selling services. IBM and Yahoo! will also compete with Oracle, Autonomy, and Fast, in addition to Google. The enterprise search industry is worth about $1 billion globally, according to Forrester Research, so any competition will have an impact on Google. Matt Brown, analyst with Forrester, says Google is likely to feel the greatest impact from the search partnership of Yahoo! and IBM, since Google's search appliance holds the greatest share of the small business search market.
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