Microsoft to release 2 search products

BEIJING, March 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Microsoft will unveil two search products Search Sever 2008 and Search Sever 2008 Express, which are for internal enterprise usage and built on the SharePoint code base, media reported Monday.

"Search Server 2008 Express is a free product for searching one server. Search Server scales to as many servers as desired," said Kirk Koenigsbauer, general manager of the Microsoft Office business platform team.

The predecessor to these products was Microsoft SharePoint Server for Search. The new versions add capabilities, such as a federation feature, which reaches out to different services and pulls them into a new set of results.

A lot of attention has been given to Microsoft's proposed 44.6 million U.S. dollars buyout of Internet search company Yahoo. "But the unveiling of SharePoint search services this week have nothing to do with Yahoo," said Koenigsbauer.

"They're used for what's called enterprise search, which is search inside the firewall," Koenigsbauer said. Users could, for example, search for an employee claim form, a Word document, a report, or a map of a building on the corporate campus.

"A single Search Server can crawl up to 50 million documents in what we call the index," he said.

(Agencies)