14 DAY TRIAL // Email searching often proves irrelevant and tiresome, because you can only specify the words or the contacts that you want the search results to show and the list might be long as Santa's naughty children list. And when you're on the go, the last thing you want to do is to be sorting through a couple of hundred emails that have the queried words in them.
The fuzzy email search engine, according to IBM, uses "advanced algorithms that can interpret incomplete queries and find information such as phone numbers, people, meetings, presentations, documents, images and more." That sounds like a good start, but unfortunately, it is only compatible with the Lotus Notes email database and with the option of adding a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook.
It is able to find information such as a person's phone number, even if the email database does not contain those exact two words, "phone" and "number" in the text. The IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES in short) does that and it also allows its users to create, save and share personalized searches for future use.
Manek Dubash, of Techworld.com, notes that "IOPES was created through a collaborative effort spanning IBM labs in Almaden in California, Haifa and Delhi. The software uses the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), an open source software framework that helps organizations build new analysis technologies to realize more value from their unstructured information by discovering relationships, identifying patterns, and predicting outcomes."
The good part is that this can be optimized by users themselves, who can add to the already built in concepts of dates, times and phone numbers, custom ones that they create and then share them. This seems to be a step forward for the email search engines in general, but I still think that the sharing part can be a little tricky and that, after a period of usage, its flaws will show up. Right now, however, it's new and shiny, so grab it while it's hot.