This morning, while the east coast of the U.S. was still in dreamland, the business software giant's chief executive was in Tokyo touting a new product which would hunt through databases, e-mail systems and documents on a computer's hard drive or on a corporate network. The bewhiskered billionaire demonstrated the software to a crowd of technology pundits after calling it "one of our biggest announcements in many, many years."

"It's very similar to the search Google does for the Internet," he said, "but imagine you could have that same exact Google-like search… for your e-mail or your company's documents, Word, e-mail, or Excel files."

The software, aimed at businesses and organizations, is similar to Google in that it uses "crawlers" to probe and index a computer's data. But Ellison said his search tool was filling a gap left by the online leviathan, which didn't " search private data very well." No one yet, he said, had "done a good job on searching private data."

Google incidentally has made a foray into personal computer searching through its Google Desktop function which can locate files, e-mails and past IM chats. Recently though, there have been concerns that its newest version, 3 Beta, compromises privacy.

One thing is certain--while Oracle gets ready to release Secure Enterprise Search on May 31, things are already heating up. Microsoft and Yahoo!, like Oracle, are also lining up products to rival Google's iron grip on the search market.