Oracle readies stand-alone enterprise search software

Oracle entered the stand-alone enterprise search market on Thursday with a new product that it hopes will do for corporate data what Google has done for public data on the Web.

Known as Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, the stand-alone search engine is for use by corporations seeking to ensure that only authorized staff are able to access sensitive business information.

"We're very excited about this product," said Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive officer, during a keynote address at the Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2006 conference in Japan on Thursday. "It's one of our biggest announcements for many, many years. It's the result of years of innovation and hard work."

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g will support the searching of a company's databases, applications, file servers, repositories, Web portals and internal and external Web sites, according to Sandeepan Banerjee, director of product management for objects and extensibility with Oracle. The search engine is integrated with multiple user authentication systems so that a particular user will only be able to see search results tied to the information they are authorized to view, he said in a phone interview Wednesday.

"Our search tool understands which information goes to which user," Greg Crider, senior director for technology marketing with Oracle, said during the phone interview.

That marks a key difference from Google, which doesn't do well searching private data, said Ellison.

"There is a reason why public search is available and popular but no one yet has done a good job on secure search," he said. "No one has done a good job yet searching private data, even though the private data is the most valuable data you have."

The system is built on an Oracle database, said Ellison.

"It's a separate database that indexes all of your data," he said. "There are crawlers, in a sense it is very similar to what Google does, but you're not crawling the public Internet. You're crawling and indexing all of your private databases, Microsoft Word files and all your data and building in a separate Oracle database all these indexes."

As different as Google and Oracle's new applications might be, there is one are where they are very similar: the interface. The Web interface to Oracle's Secure Enterprise Search shown during the keynote was very similar to the minimalist public Google search engine, with search types above a centrally placed text box and an "advanced search" link to the right of the box.

Oracle has 15 years of experience in full-text search technologies incorporating such capabilities into its databases, data warehouse software and business intelligence tools, according to Banerjee. However, the new software will be the company's first stab at a stand-alone enterprise product, he said. Previously, a customer wanting such stand-alone capabilities would need to do their own development work to build on top of the Oracle Text search technologies, Banerjee added.

Ellison encouraged users to download the application and take it for a test drive before deciding whether to buy it or not.