Why am I mentioning them now? Because it's my reaction to Google's January 5 announcement that they've added features to their Search Appliance which give Enterprise customers the ability to customize search results for their individual corporate environments. The Google Search Appliance now also offers improved integration with Google services as well as additional content sources. Features include Hit Clustering and Source biasing that work together with Documentum and other Content Management software.

Three weeks earlier (December 13, 2006) IBM/Yahoo released a limited functionality enterprise search application that is available for download FREE of charge, according to blogger Raj Bala (who spent more than 10 years working at software companies now owned by EMC.) Raj writes that though this capability isn't new, IT IS FREE.

Here is a clip of what else he says:

The crawler portion of the Yahoo/IBM branded version of the application supports not only file systems as source, but also allows HTTP urls to be added that can be included in search results. The OmniFind Enterprise Edition supports larger business, enterprise class sources for the crawler such as FileNet, Documentum, DB2 Content Manager, Hummingbird, Sharepoint, and OpenText amongst others. The concept of crawling an ECM repository and providing federated results is not new by any means -- every major ECM vendor makes a point to be able to crawl their competitors' repositories. The Enterprise edition requires the WebSphere Information Integrator Content Edition acquired from Venetica) that provides federated search functionality from the various ECM sources.

Now what is my surprise, surprise, surprise quote all about? It's my new-found realization that the competition between Google and Yahoo is still kicking. This delights me because it has produced a few cool toys for non-IT folk like me to play with. I was learning Google syntax for my searches yesterday and now Yahoo's Live Search does it for me. Surprise, surprise, surprise Google no longer rules on my WebTop. I love it for desktop searches, though.

In any case, if this rivalry can produce wins for your user/customers like it does for me, COOL!