Andy Wojewodka, director of business systems and decision support at Del Monte Foods Co. in San Francisco, said the combination of the search engines would also improve the decision making process at his company, which has standardized on Cognos BI tools.

Wojewodka said Del Monte now uses more traditional methods of gathering unstructured data into a package for users. "We try to address this by -- guess what -- more spreadsheets and Word documents," he said. Updating those documents presents significant challenges, he said. Using a search engine to access the now unavailable information would be a "huge win" for the company, he added.

Cognos last April started offering a link between its search tool and the Google Search Appliance that can also search through unstructured data. That link, however, requires users to purchase the Google appliance, which is priced from about US$30,000 for capabilities similar to the IBM-Yahoo tool, according to the Google Web site.

Other BI vendors, including Hyperion Solutions Corp., Business Objects SA and Information Builders Inc., have also added support for the Google appliances.

Henry Morris, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., noted that the increasingly common linkage of BI and search tools stems from a corporate eagerness to expand the reach of BI.