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Which is why they bought FaST.

This isn't about search - it's barely about advertising.

For search engines they have already acquired Fast, so they are in the search business.

In my opinion they are probably out to diminish the smaller actors in online advertising to gain more clients on their own advertisement service before going for Google. That either by buying or by creating confusion. It is possible that they see that there is an end to the incomes generated by Windows and Office and that they need a new area where they can put their leverage in. And don't expect it to go soft - they will do the bandwagon thing by first eliminate the competition and then raise the prices to pay off the investment.

Combine this with all the FUD they are spreading and chairs thrown and you get a M$-blue future where all needs DirectX and Silverlight on their computer to read mail, search the web or browse /.

Enterprise search is always difficult, companies like Fast Search and Transfer specialize in it. They have all sorts of document filtering pipelines and customized database connectors to hook all sorts of data into their search system. It also scales quite will across a cluster.

On the specific topic of this supposed top 100 list, I notice it is mostly a list of what is 'neat' as most high ranking non-top 4 search engines are not listed. Neilsen and most other traffic rating groups would definitely not agree with this list. Not a big deal, though the title is definitely misleading.

FAST Search & Transfer has ESP - best search engine for the enterprise
find them at http://www.fastsearch.com/

In a presentation by Fast Search and Transfer in 1999, a couple hundred students were shown their audio search by microphone. The presenter whistled (quite badly, according to the laughter of most of the students) a part of the "Pink Panther" theme song, and searched for MIDI files on the web with the result. At least 80% of the hits were relevant...

Also try Scirus from the facts at FAST. I've often had better luck there than on google.

That should actually be "AlltheWeb (Overture)", not "AllTheWeb (FAST)", as Overture bought AllTheWeb from FAST earlier this year.

Or maybe Yahoo will be using FAST DataSearch, instead of the AllTheWeb engine...

AllTheWeb was actually developed by Fast, not Lycos. Fast's websearch business was bought by Overture earlier this year, before Overture was bought by Yahoo.

What Yahoo will do with AllTheWeb is anyone's guess...

... [damn short subjects]... to search than web content.

FAST has a stronger business in search solutions, not a web search engine. All the web, one of FAST's newer products is hopping to change that and it seems that this is what Overture is hoping to capitalize on. Most of FAST's current business comes from outsourcing search and indexing technology/support to other companies such as Lycos and various article and abstract databases. http://www.fastsearch.com/partners/ has a list of some of their bigger customers. Google still doesn't have quite the same penetration that FAST has in the corporate intranet and 'other than html' search areas. Personally I think this is due to the nature of Google's hit relevancy algorithms... very good for heavily cross referenced/linked data sets... not as good at pure keyword type searches and very limited support of advanced linguistic features.

You're missing by far the biggest intranet vendors. Verity is the king of this market, and have been since the mid-90s. They get a lot of mileage out of their OEM sales; it sounds simpler to a company if they hear that they "already have Verity" within Documentum or Cold Fusion or whatever.

It'll be very interesting to see what they do with the Inktomi purchase. (They bought the productized search before Yahoo snarfed up the external services.) Inktomi is IMHO the best intranet search engine right now. (I believe Verity is dropping the Inktomi name and is calling the tool Ultraseek, which goes back to Inktomi's acquisition of Intelliseek.) The purchase gave Verity yet another leg up with enterprise search, it'll be interesting to see if they leverage the technology or if they see this more as a marketing move.

Google is obviously a big player here too. Don't need to evangelize to the /. crowd on that. However Gooogle still has a way to go in understanding how to tackle enterprise search.

Autonomy is another big player in the enterprise, though I am less familiar with their tools.

Other interesting enterprise search vendors include FAST, Isys, and Divine/Northern Light (yes they're still around). Teoma/Ask Jeeves could get there if they productize their search tool. Lots of interesting approaches there but nobody who's quite moved up into the first tier.

Anyway, it's a messy space even with all the consolidation above. I have no idea whether Ovation will keep up their enterprise sales effort or not; I suppose it depends on how profitable that part of the business is. Guess we'll find out...

The company 'FAST' quoted in the article should NOT link to www.surffast.com. Obviously this is refering to the Norwegian company www.fastsearch.com who operates the supposed 'Google-killer'(obviously a bit magnamimous, yet still a good alternative) www.alltheweb.com .

I couldn't agree more on the need for more than one search engine. We all have our own particular favourites, be it football team, car or brand of tea. The same can also be said of search engines, and for many people at the moment it seems to be Google. On the courses that I run I usually ask the question 'what's your favourite search engine?' and the two that are most often mentioned are Google and Yahoo!

At the Online Conference in London recently I attended several talks on search engines and workshops regarding them, and AltaVista was barely mentioned. However, even just a couple of years ago AltaVista was highly regarded as perhaps the best of the free text search engines; it had a large database which was regularly updated, it was also constantly updating and adding new features and its search syntax was very flexible. Yet now it's being seen as an also ran and on at least one newsgroup that I take (alt.internet.search-engines) the majority of web authors say that they hardly pay any attention to it.

I chose to look at AlltheWeb, otherwise known as 'FAST' rather than Google, if for no other reason than many people are already aware of what Google can offer, and I thought it would be more interesting to concentrate on a slightly lesser known search engine, but one which is increasingly being mentioned these days.

AlltheWeb is owned by Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST), a Norwegian company. FAST claims that it has over 625,000,000 web pages indexed, which is certainly an acceptable size and is comparable to AltaVista and Northern Light, but still lagging some way behind Google. However, it is making considerable claims for both the freshness of it's data - it claims a rate of between 9-12 days which puts it way out in front of the other major engines - and for its news stories, claiming in a press release "Indexing up to 800 news stories per minute and real-time indexing of news stories from over three thousand online sources" AllTheWeb Upgrade Announcement

The main search page is very clear and uncluttered, consisting of a single screen, which makes a change from the confusing approach taken by AltaVista, while providing more immediate functionality than Google. The user has several immediate options; a choice of language to search in (almost 50 different languages), the search box itself to enter terms, a tick box to tell the engine to search for the exact phrase, and options to search for web pages, new, pictures, videos, MP3 files and FTP files. An important fact to note is that with AllTheWeb you can search directly in news- something that can't be done with Google.

AllTheWeb has one of the most customisable interfaces I've seen in a very long time.

The search results page more than make up for some of the other less exciting features. The screen is clear and uncluttered, with none of those 'featured sites' that are becoming increasingly common with other search engines, such as AltaVista. At the very top of the list of results are a number of 'Beta Fast Topics' which are a dozen or so specific topics related to the results retrieved - rather like the Northern Light customised search folders, and which provide the same function - a quick way of narrowing a search down to a smaller tightly focussed group of pages. AllTheWeb provides a brief summary of the page returned, the size, and if appropriate, the opportunity of retrieving more hits from that specific site, using the same approach that AltaVista uses. Another nice feature is that even if the user does a search for web pages, a small box pops up on the right hand side giving the results of a multimedia search, with an indication of the number of hits found for images and video.

In conclusion therefore, AllTheWeb combines many of the best features of other search engines, with few of their disadvantages. That combined with the freshness of its data does make it look a very attractive alternative to Google, and worryingly for AltaVista, a very viable replacement for their own offering. I suspect that in the coming few months I shall be paying rather more visits to AllTheWeb, and rather less to AltaVista.

See here for the complete article written on this subject including actual comparisons Goodbye Altavista, hallo AllTheWeb

Fast Search & Transfer has developed a "whistle sreach". Just whistle a few notes from the song you want, and their searchengine finds the songs mathcing.

I have tried it and can confirm it works really well.

Story from newscientist.com here. (cache)
Also a article from GEMENI here.

"Other search services, including Fast Search, update their engines every 30 days. Google typically updates every 28 days. "