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Microsoft has announced its first line of products for the lower end of the enterprise search market, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express. Although Microsoft already has enterprise search functionality built into SharePoint Server 2007, it is a fully-fledged software portal targeted at the higher end of the corporate market. Microsoft claims that the standalone Search Server product will be easier to install and administer.

Microsoft is hoping to gain the attention of the SMB market, by offering features that would otherwise be available only in costlier enterprise search systems, such as unlimited document indexing and the ability to tune the relevance of the results that people receive when they make queries.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft group product manager for enterprise search, said the idea is to get people to start using one capability of SharePoint, hoping that it convinces them to pay money for the additional capabilities.

Search Server 2008 Express is free to download and use, and there are no limitations on the number of documents that can be indexed. The paid-for version of the product, the price for which is yet to be announced, will also allow users to install it in a load-balanced environment alongside other search engines if required.

Microsoft's competitors in this area include Google, which sells its own enterprise search appliance. Matt Rosoff, an analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft, said he suspects that a part of Microsoft's motivation here is to try to keep Google from getting more market share.

"They've seen what Google is doing in the consumer space, and they're looking at Google encroaching in the enterprise," Rosoff said. "Free is pretty hard to compete against."

Microsoft Search Server 2008 will be able to run on Windows Server 2003. Both Search Server 2008 and its free version will be available in full in the first half of next year -- around the time that Windows Server 2008 becomes available -- although the first release candidate is available now for free on Microsoft servers.

The big limitation of these products is that they can only run on a single computer server. Companies that want to use Search Server Express with a collection of server hardware would need to opt for Microsoft's higher-end SharePoint products, or competing software/hardware combinations. The other major catch is that Search Server Express requires Microsoft's Windows Server operating system.