Today we released IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition to the public. You can find and download it here. This is the first product I've worked on since I've been at IBM that has been released to the public, so I can actually say something publically about it. By the way, my opinions and views do not necessarily reflect those of IBM and blah blah blah. Still with me? My roles on this project were to test the admin console, move us to a new test case repository, verify bug fixes, run long running tests looking for memory leaks, test some of the API calls, argue with developers about features/bugs, test the public page, and ensure the right files are there when the public was able to start downloading and using it. Other things popped up along the way and there were fires to put out (as always), so that goes without any official documentation. :-) So you may be wondering if it is worth your time to download, install, and starting using Yahoo! Edition. I'll try to answer that. The short answer is "it depends". If you have a windows or linux box where you can let Yahoo! Edition run and it won't conflict with other applications you are running on that box then yes I'd say go for it. The index is limited to 500,000 documents (web pages and/or word docs, pdf files, etc...), so if you think you will be crawling more web pages or files than that this might not be the solution you need. Our target audience is people running company intranet web sites. Most companies nowadays have internal web sites that have wikis, HR information, holiday party information, etc... With Yahoo! Edition you can crawl all those pages and make them easily searchable from any page, all you have to do is point your search box at Yahoo! Edition or include a link to the Yahoo! Edition search page. Additionally Yahoo! Edition is integrated with Yahoo! search right out of the box which means that after you find out your company HR information you can search Yahoo! from the same browser page. And even better is that it is FREE. Other potential uses include using it as the search engine for your own personal blog (which I intend to do), using it to build your own recipe search engine (only crawl the recipe sites that you like), or using it to only crawl files on your hard drive and make them searchable. There is a lot of fun to be had here, so I recommend downloading it and giving it a try. And if you have any questions or comments post them to the forum, my collegues and I will be reading through them and answering questions. Enjoy!
Posted by troutm8 at December 13, 2006 12:34 PM