IBM is going to offer free, downloadable, entry-level search software that looks like Yahoo to businesses so they can find information on the web or stored internally.

It's called IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition and it can riffle through a maximum of 500,000 documents in 30 language and 200 file types per server while being integrated with Yahoo's web search.

Google sells a hardware-based search appliance that does pretty much the same thing for, oh, $30,000. The widget starts at $2k.

IBM will be using the Yahoo Edition as a teaser to upgrade folks to its real OmniFind search, which includes features such as business analytics, e-commerce and customer service self-helps.

Yahoo gets to try to wean the corporate crowd off of Google web searches.

IBM, which is also thinking about stalling Microsoft and Oracle, says the entry-level stuff takes only three clicks to install. It uses the open source Lucene indexing library for full-text cross-platform indexing. It offers automatic spell correction, support for synonyms and shortcuts, wildcard support to substitute for unknown characters, query reporting and GUI customization. IBM will be providing paid phone support.

See http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.com.