IBM revealed on Thursday a test version of OmniFind Personal Email Search, a new program that is likely to become a much appreciated search tool among corporate employees using Microsoft Outlook or IBM’s Lotus Notes to store their emails. The OmniFind Personal Email Search is in fact a semantic search engine that will offer companies and their employees highly advanced email searching features.

IBM claimed that its new program will take search beyond traditional limits, (that is keywords), because it will be able to make associations between the underlying concepts of words often used in corporate email. Thus, users will be able to find useful information hidden in their email databases in just seconds.

For example, if a person is looking for someone else’s phone number, he or she will type simply “John Doe phone” and the query will return John Doe’s phone number. Similarly to people, OmniFind Personal Email Search is smart enough to associate that the person is looking for John Doe’s phone number.

The new program was developed by IBM researchers at the company’s facilities in India, Israel and California; they first built an index of keywords usually found in corporate email and then built another index of associated concepts and relationships. Thus, the system will match the searched words with the keyword index, but will deliver only results based on associations. IBM’s researchers also added rules that help the software determine what information is most likely being sought.

OmniFind Personal Email Search uses an open source software framework for semantic search called the Unstructured Information Management Architecture, which was developed also by IBM and is currently under the Apache Software Foundation.

So, although semantic search is likely to become less and less effective in a growing universe of possible relationships and associations, restraining its application to corporate email systems could be a smart move for IBM. The company made its software available on its AlphaWorks Web site for free.