Microsoft Enters Search Box Fray

[Brett_Tabke]

[news.yahoo.com...]

San Francisco (IDGNS) - Microsoft is set to release a pair of low-cost enterprise search products, a move one company official said comes at a time when the market in question is "at a tipping point."

The products, Search Server 2008 and Search Server Express 2008, are based on technology pulled out of SharePoint Server 2007, according to Jared Spataro, group product manager for enterprise search at Microsoft.

[carguy84]

Well, if it works anything like Indexing Service, then it's time to buy Swiffer stock, as these things will be doing nothing but collecting dust.

[vincevincevince]

Perhaps WebmasterWorld's search solution has finally arrived? The Google Appliance range has always put me off due to the usage volume limitations.

I see two naturally competitive models in this market; (a) retailers of essentially similar systems who sell only software to install on your own hardware, and (b) web-based services which are able to crawl and index internal pages through authentication.

With the rush-to-the-bottom we tend to see in this market, as it commoditises further I would be surprised if there aren't robust open-source platforms along the lines of (a) above. Finally, if Google notices people using the Microsoft Search Server then they will like-as-not open up their hosted solutions under model (b) to recapture eyeballs.

[sun818]

This might be a good way for niche search engines to offer their services without having to code their own search engine.

[ispy]

Leaving aside the 'H' tag thing