A Whole new “Free” for Search Engines
December 13th, 2006 by Christopher HarrisSure, you can go access the results from many different search engines for free, but until now actually having your own search engine was a bit expensive. Not the key phrase in that sentence…until now. Today, IBM and Yahoo! announced the release of IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition as a free download. While you are limited to 500,000 records, that is hardly something to nitpick about when you are talking about a free search engine.
So what does this mean for libraries? Well, it isn’t the end all be all. For isntance, it won’t fix problems with the OPAC without some serious work. It also doesn’t support image files at this time, so it won’t be taking over for digital image galleries right away.
Still, there are some possibilities for use. It does support Microsoft Office and Star Office formats as well as PDFs, so you could use this to search within a digital text repository. It also supports XML file formats which means you could convert MARC to XML and have some fun that way I think. Another possibility is the ability to crawl specified websites. Look at everything that has been done with the customized Google searching and think about the possibilities when you have even more control over the crawling robot! A great feature is the ability to control the back-end index to apply synonyms and futz with relevancy ranking. Ahh…if only our OPACs had that!
I can’t wait for some of the coders in the library world to get their hands on this and start playing. For now I will sit here and think about the future possiblities that are revealed by this new leap forward in availability of search technology.