Yahoo and IBM jointly introduced free software that businesses could use to find information stored in their own computers or on the Internet.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition was billed as a "no-cost, entry-level enterprise search product" and went up against offerings from Google and other competitors in a growing business data search market.

"Organizations of all sizes are faced with the problem of too much information residing in different locations and in different formats, making it nearly impossible to quickly extract meaning," said IBM general manager Ambuj Goyal.

Enterprise search systems typically cost thousands of dollars. Google has offerings selling for as much as 30,000 dollars (US) in what is considered the low end of the business market.

IBM already markets OmniFind versions for corporations. The free offering was tailored for small businesses and included Yahoo Search services.

The Yahoo-powered IBM offering can be downloaded for free and easily installed on existing computer hardware, according to the companies.

OmniFind can handle as many as 500,000 pages per server and can scan documents in more than 30 languages, according to IBM.