These results have been released almost more than a week before the schedule Wednesday and it is likely to stable IBM’s stock price and will also help to lift other big technology stocks in Thursday trading. IBM is known as a component of the Dow Jones industrial average.

The per share profit of the company beat the forecast from Wall Streets by 4 cents and the company reaffirms its annual earnings guidance. These are being considered some good signs as the core businesses of IBM are doing well even in the worsening U.S. economy.

Though sales were more than $1 billion short than analysts’ estimates, the estimate on average basis would lower by the planned Oct.16 announcement as most of the analysts had cut their forecasts.

In the first half of the year, IBM shares ran up steadily and afterward they started sliding in the summer .And then during the last week the dropped off precipitously because of the fears about its heavy exposure to the diseased financial services sector that makes almost 30 percent of its business.

After this unexpected announcement, IBM’s stock gained $5.35 percent and become $95.90 in after-hours trading and it is wroth mentioning that IBM’s stock was 31 percent down since July.

This “OmniFind Personal Email Search”, has been designed by researchers at IBM facilities in California, Israel, and India. This new innovative concept of email search takes search beyond keywords by being able to make associations between the underlying concepts of words often used in ‘corporate e-mails’. IBM also intends to offer customers technology that can help them retrieve useful information hidden in e-mail databases.

The facility works with simplicity in search. For instance, if a person is looking for a colleague’s phone number, then typing “Smith phone” in the query box. The search would then Smith’s phone number. It becomes possible because the system is smart enough to make the association that the person is looking for Smith’s number, and not just any phone number in an e-mail with the word Smith in it.

Adding much facility to this search system the IBM designers created an index of keywords found in corporate e-mail, and then linked it with another index of associated concepts and relationships.

Shiv Vaithyanathan, manager of unstructured information mining at” IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA” ,says, “ when a query is submitted, the system first matches the words with those in the keyword index, and then delivers results based on the associations”. Specialists at IBM have also added rules to help the system determine what information is most likely being sought.

“OmniFind Personal Email Search” uses the ‘Unstructured Information Management Architecture’ which is an open source software framework for semantic search. IBM was the pioneer developer of this technology, which is now under the ‘Apache Software Foundation’.

This new and creative search based system has enabled the IBM specialists to have developed technology that runs on top of the framework for quickly extracting words and concepts from electronic documents, comparing them to the indexes and delivering results based on algorithms developed by the scientists.

Several major corporate companies including ‘Google’, ‘Microsoft’, and ‘Yahoo’, are also developing more advanced search algorithms in order to deliver better answers to queries.

Shiv Vaithyanathan accepts that semantic search becomes less effective as the universe of possible concepts and relationships associated with words grows, which is why it would be difficult to implement, for example, in a huge, general purpose Web mail system.

Targeting a corporate e-mail system gives researchers a narrower set of possibilities in determining the kind of associations the system should make of words. In addition, IBM has made it possible for developers to expand the “OmniFind Indexes”.

IBM is making the software available at free of cost on its AlphaWorks Web site. The company at the same time hopes that the feedback it gets from developers will help to improve the technology by finding its shortcomings. “Finding out the things we should do is precisely why we’re putting it out there,” said Shiv Vaithyanathan.