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Microsoft Buys Search Engine, Going After Google?
obsolete1349 writes "Microsoft has just bid 1.2 billion dollars for FAST (Fast Search And Transfer [Microsoft to use a self-recursive acronym?]), an enterprise search company. 'Microsoft can bundle FAST with its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server' with its soon-to-be-customers Comcast, Disney, Microsoft, Pfizer, and UBS."
...I'm going to snipe them and bid 1.3 Billion at the last second.
FLR
FAST -- FSAT
Is it just me, or did they spell FSAT... er, FAST... wrong?
Always wins the race in the end.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
FSAT?
..... search engine? Why do they need two?
Bundle it, eh? Some will say "hooray, more functionality!" Others will cry, "unfair competition!" Microsoft will make more money, more people will stick with a mediocre Microsoft product out of inertia and/or lock-in, and, in other news, the sun will rise.
Microsoft has been using one for quite some time now:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/nl-nl/directx/aa937793(en-us).aspx
Q: What does XNA stand for?
A: XNA's Not Acronymed
What a wonderful development; MS buys FAST for search, and the majority of the computing world faces a little more SLOW: Software Lock-in On Windows.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
It's a Dyslexic Recursive Algorithm, or a DAR.
FAST has been losing money like crazy, and Microsoft completely bailed them out by over-paying for the buy out. The acquisition does not make any sense. A company that is incapable of profiting from its products normally indicates that the product is lacking.
-i
It seems that quite a few FAST employees are currently submitting their resumes to other companies here in Norway at the moment. I've seen more than a couple during the last couple of days.
Funny, that.
I know companies have been doing this for ages but do these tech acquisitions make sense in the long run? I've only ever been involved in non-tech buyouts and it always seems like the value of the acquired company ends up being destroyed by the new step-parent. There's the whole -- I refuse to use synergy so I'll instead call it the "thing" -- there's the "thing" that makes the company work, the sum of management culture, staff, institutional knowledge, and relationships built up with customers and vendors. Whenever a company gets purchased, the "thing" usually dies. I mean, consider a restaurant. When the owner/proprietor is gone you may have the building and the decor but is it going to be the same? The proprietor made sure he hired the right staff, made sure they knew how to cook his way, ordered the right ingredients, the whole laundry list of little details that really add up.
That's what I don't understand about these big tech buyouts. Typically there's a culture clash between the smaller company and the big corporation, the developers get upset and leave to go find a place that's fun again. Even if they stay, the managers from the larger company have to start marking territory like alpha dogs and efficiency falls apart. It seems to be impossible for managers to come in and say "Hey, you guys know what you're doing, all we're going to do is get your manager up to speed on HR and our accounting codes. Aside from that, keep on doing what you were doing that made you worth buying in the first place. That is all." If you drive all the developers away, all you're left with is software you don't understand and a huge learning curve for getting up to speed.
I suppose there's the cynical rationalization for this sort of deal, like HP buying Compaq. It was a really dumb match but Carly Fiorina and her top executives would get some fat bonuses for guiding such a huge deal to completion -- so from the perspective of her pocketbook, the deal was a huge win.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Fast Search And Transfer would be FSAT or FST, not FAST. Microsoft is allowed to have self-recursive acronyms if they are bugged. ;)
That aside, I see Microsoft as a company that's losing direction by pulling itself in too many at once. The company seems to be Hell-bent on conquering every corner of their market, and then any markets they hadn't originally targeted. I feel that a lot of their recent releases on their broad spectrum of product lines have been rather mediocre.
I can see why the company may believe it is necessary to incorperate this into their other products, but didn't Microsoft already introduce a search engine that was supposed to compete with Google? Wasn't that what Live was for?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Jay! Keep innovating Microsoft!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/25/overture_buys_fasts_web_search/
Overture bought FAST's search arm before Yahoo in turn bought Overture.
Now they grew a new arm, and are selling that one to Microsoft?
Outstanding.
How can a search engine that nobody has ever heard of be worth 1.3 billion? Especially if they only plan on integrating it with Office. How hard coudl it possibly be to develop a search engine for Office from scratch? Certainly it wouldn't cost anywhere near 1.2 BILLION. And when you buy someone else's engine, you still have to integrate it with your software which, depending on how different the code bases are, can be nearly as difficult as just doing it from scratch. So.. WTF? I'd understand if they were buying some big name engine to get a Brand and customers and such. But this? Sounds like a money waster.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
"with its soon-to-be-customers Comcast, Disney, Microsoft, Pfizer, and UBS" I understand why it is said, but it is just very silly ...
FAST in the UK is the Federation Against Software Theft http://www.fast.org.uk/ I completely mis-read this, that Microsoft are investing in copyright protection.
The title of this post makes no sense. FAST is an enterprise search engine. It isn't even remotely like Google. In fact if you RTFA, you'll see it says: "You can expect Google to make a purchase in enterprise search along with traditional enterprise players like HP, IBM and the usual suspects." So this is so different from what Google currently does that Google is more likely to buy it than build it.
They will pay 1.2 billion for that. That looks like quite some ROI to me.
How many times does MS have to throw money at an online business only to kill it or let it die from stupidity before they learn that whatever it is that makes them successful otherwise is POISON to what they think they can accomplish with any online business?
Honestly, Redmond has started and stopped and shoveled money into a furnace for what 5, 6, 7 different 'strategic' online eSomething something acquisitions? They SUUUUUUCCCCKKKK at this.
Microsoft is a company that's genetically averse to partnering with anyone. Everything has to be Microsoft branded Microsoft operated and Microsoft micromanaged. What makes anyone think that they won't screw this up too?
The sole exception is XBox Live because frankly, Redmond's own ignorance works to their advantage here. They recognize they really don't know WTF they're doing so they basically stay out of the way.
What made AlltheWeb work was FAST's underlying search technology. What's surprising is that it has taken so long for someone to realise that FAST is more valuable that the AlltheWeb website was. So, if MS can ever get their search results to the quality that AlltheWeb used to provide, then this could well be a smart move. After all, doing it in-house has been pretty unsuccessful.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
FAST is a search engine designed for searching unstructured data files such as word and email folders, it's not really intended for use as web search engine. It's mostly an embedded search-engine used in other products (for example I believe that EMC's Centera uses FAST for the text search capabilities.) As such, I would expect it to become the search-engine embedded in SharePoint, along with some sort of a policy engine to do data classification and management.
Version 1.0 has the screwed up acronym.
Version 1.0 SP1 will correct it to the incorrect FaSAT.
Version 2.0 will change it to FaST.
Version 3.0 will be FSAT.
Infuriate left and right
Microsoft's not going after Google. If anything, they're pre-empting them (but even that would be hypothetical, unless Microsoft's been participating in some sort of industrial espionage...)
FAST is an enterprise search platform, which enables corporations to quickly search their entire repository of documents (assuming that they already have one). Given that SharePoint is increasingly being marketed as a large-scale document repository, this is a perfectly logical direction for Microsoft to take. FAST can be easily integrated into Microsoft's existing product portfolio, can easily be marketed (document storage and search is a hot area at the moment), and will greatly increase the value of their existing products. Even though the $1.2bn pricetag seems absurdly high, the purchase makes perfect sense from a business perspective.
The only way in which Microsoft is "going after Google" is that Google could hypothetically choose to develop a similar product. The Google Search Appliance is somewhat similar, although it's not in widespread use, and fills a rather different niche than SharePoint. Unless Google wants to seriously focus on delivering an enterprise-grade version of Google Docs, and providing a heavy-grade search feature to match, the relevance of this story to Google is tenuous at best.
Also, FAST isn't a recursive acronym. It's not even an acronym at all in English (or it'd be FSAT). Given that FAST is based in Norway, I'd guess that the phrase properly spells the acronym in Norwegian (although "fast" probably doesn't exist in the Norwegian lexicon, so I'm not even sure that's explanation either....)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Disney? Are you sure? Like Steve jobs owns majority of shares Disney?
1) Its FAst Search and Transfer
2) Microsoft paid for and bought an Enterprise search engine, not an internet search engine. As has already been pointed out, their internet search engine was bought by Overture. Similar to how Ultraseek's internet engine was bought by Yahoo, and their enterprise search was bought by Verity (now Autonomy).
FAST actually has a fairly strong presence in the enterprise search market, and beat out the Google appliance in terms of features and management when I last looked at it a couple of years ago.
Does nobody else see that this is just MS buying out the competition. it's true that they will run the company they buy into the ground, tey always do but then there will be less competition and more MS. Sound like a familiar pattern?
For about $45 million they could get a perpetual license to FAST's software and the stack of 500 DL 380s it's currently sitting on.
Isn't Microsoft already going after Google with MS Live? Setting up an index and searching tool for their internal stuff is a "no-duh" move. Novell has had Quickfinder for a zillion years I am actually surprised Microsoft has gone this long without one of their own.
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
Why else would a relatively unknown piece of software be worth almost as much as YouTube?
Good thing it's a SELF-recursive acronym, as opposed to some other kind of recursion...
This acquisition is going to mean some chaos in my industry. Full disclosure: My company, Dieselpoint, is a Fast competitor.
The enterprise search market is an industry unto itself, entirely different from web search. In this industry we sell search software for data inside a company, as opposed to general web search. In some ways, it's a much harder technical problem to solve than web search, because we deal with a much wider variety of data, security schemes, navigation rules, platforms, programming environments, etc.. Total industry size is between $1 and $2 billion, depending on how you count.
Enterprise search is interesting to larger firms like Microsoft because it touches everything in the enterprise. Everybody wants easy-to-use search for everything -- the intranet, the email archive, the content management system, the ERP system, the HR system, the CRM system, the works. It's a hard thing to do well, and the company that does it is difficult to dislodge. Being the company's internal search engine is a good strategic position to be in.
The industry is currently very fragmented, and no one has the upper hand. Fast was probably the most dominant competitor, though not the largest one. The largest one is Autonomy, but that has morphed more into a portfolio company with a lot of legacy products than a company focused on search. Fast was really the up-and-comer, and despite the financial difficulties, the one we had the hardest time selling against. Everyone else is secondary.
The acquisition means some chaos in this industry, for one major reason: Fast is no longer a viable cross-platform solution, and won't be considered for many corporate deals. There's going to be a scramble to take over the mantle.
Cross-platform capability is critical for corporate deals because, again, everybody wants to search everything. It's tough to do that if you only run on a Microsoft operating system. And while I'm sure Fast will continue to claim they'll support all platforms, who will believe them? This is Microsoft, after all. Non-Microsoft operating systems, Java, and the rest of the non-Microsoft-controlled technology will receive only short shrift in the future.
So this is really big news for our little industry.
Chris
I wonder how Lucene compares with FAST in terms of generic unstructured text searching, perhaps someone who knows more about FAST or Lucene can answer?
I made a typo in the Internet Explorer address bar just yesterday and was redirected to Live Search. Funny thing is I had explicitly set "do not search from address bar" but that mysteriously changed after a recent Microsoft update. I guess this was a needed (financial) security update (for Microsoft).
Google isn't in the enterprise search space. Yes, they have the appliance, but that doesn't count. What FAST offers is a good product coupled with the professional services organization to integrate it into a business's workflow. The companies that Microsoft is now going head-to-head with are Endeca, Autonomy, Vivisimo, and their ilk.
Yes.
They go after EVERYBODY...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I don't really understand that title here. MS Sharepoint in no way competes with Google even with enterprise search capability. As far as I've seen, Google has no equivalent to enterprise search. Better yet, I should say Google has no equivalent yet. This is not to say they aren't going to dive into this market.
From what I've seen, Sharepoint will benefit from searching capability a great deal, and although it pains me to say this, Sharepoint is actually a half decent product in its own right.
FAST is not a self-recursive acronym. FAST stands for "FAst Search and Transfer". The "fast" in the expanded acronym is not the acronym FAST, it is the actual word fast, therefore it is not a self-recursive acronym.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
If you want to "beat" Google - you have to go where google finds itself "too good" to go. In the beginning Google where an amazing search engine that gave us ALL what we where searching for , they don't do that anymore - because everyone (including YOU) trust them with everything you know -meaning - you will believe everything you search...but alas...I am afraid thats not quite the case. Google SENSORS a lot of data, they didn't do that in the beginning - hence why they became so popular in the first place, after popularity comes responsibility - hence google controls the content - for a certain amount of money- Google will delete all search information availiable on "whatever you pay for" if you so request. Therefor - it is no longer an "unbiased" real - search engine - it is dead. You want proof? I will personally deliver you proof of this if you are incapable of finding out yourself. Example. I put a certain "Fan-Reproduction" of a famous character on the web, ok...I recreated it in 3D while the original was made in 2D...but it was SO good that the company got google to remove all reference to it..so no one - no matter how you searched - could ever find it via google...all my other images they could find easily...but these vanished from google forever. Still not convinced? Think it's some doof idiot out there being paranoid? Ok - check this out: Try searching for relatively questionable information via your average google (insert country here...you KNOW they will force you to your country searches anyway)...ok...now go to a proxy placed in another country - now - do a search about the same stuff again - and experience different search results. Convinced yet? Well - there you have it - anyone with just the BASICS of brains will already have discovered this - so if you want to win the search engine wars? Easy - just provide UNBIASED - UNFILTERED search results - and bobs your uncle!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
"There's be gold in them thar Interwebs! Set sail fer Norway!"
"But Cap'in, the ship! She be takin on water!"
"Damn the water! Norway and GOLD! ."
And so the Dread Pirates of Redmond sailed to Norway, but their ship, the M.S.N. Vista, sank on the return trip due to rot brought about by years of shoddy repair work and the weight of countless ill-advised upgrades and too much booty. A combination which had rendered it a lumbering hulk, no longer seaworthy.
Show of hands, whose surprised Microsoft wants to go after Google?
Second show of hands, who thinks Pirate metaphors should be used to illustrate everything?
"Yarrrr!"
Same old Microsoft M.O. Don't innovate. Acquire.
Read about MOSS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint_Services#Microsoft_Office_SharePoint_Server
Read about Google - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Enterprise_products
Apart from the keyword "search", there's very few similarities at all. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is in it's own genre it would appear.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Aww, Bill haven't we been through this already. Remember how much Vista cost us? There's no way we can afford to write the damn thing ourselves. We are morons, Bill, but we know how to spend money. We must spend every penny possible to FUCKING KILL GOOGLE. KILL! -drool-
FAST has been losing money like crazy, and Microsoft completely bailed them out by over-paying for the buy out. The acquisition does not make any sense. A company that is incapable of profiting from its products normally indicates that the product is lacking.
That thinking is, like, soooooooo pre-1998. Next thing you'll be telling me is that a company with nothing but a sock puppet and a Super Bowl ad won't make money. Get with the 90s.
Parent post is modded insightful - is that for the explanation of recursive acronyms or for the "nobody cares" line at the bottom?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Google should not be worried if MS plans to go 100% Windows Server...
There's a hidden hilarity here which won't be obvious to most readers.
I worked for a little known search engine company called Convera - formerly known as Excalibur and under other guises. It has been around for over 20 years and has been constantly on the verge of the next best thing. Its most successful product, RetrievalWare (RW) was very popular in government circles during the late 90s and early 2000s.
Last year, making its only real profit in all that time (it has burned through about $1Bn in financing), Convera sold its legacy RW product to, guess who:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convera_Corporation
Yes, Fast, for the bargain sum of $23 Million. And then Fast turns around and sells itself to MS for 50 times that amount. If we assume that the value added by RW is 1/5th of Fast's value, then that's an inflation of 10 times.
The comedy.
A recursive acronym refers to the acronym in the expression it stands for. Fast is a plain English word used with its standard meaning, it's not back-referring to itself. WINE is a recursive acronym because it stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator. The word WINE in the expression also refers to the acronym itself, as well as being part of it. The word fast is not referring to the acronym FAST, it's used as an adjective to describe the searching.
The self-recursive acronym is notable because it is self-stable and redundant, making it much more desirable than the mere recursive acronym.
Stop Losers from Overwhelming the World
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
"Self-recursive?" Oh brother. The FAST acronym obviously isn't recursive, but no acronym in the universe is "self-recursive." Morons.
Where have you people been? Microsoft has been in the search/portal business for years and years and years. How did THAT headline ever get posted here?
Globally Emit Repeated Propaganda.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
[Holds up hook and squints.]
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Are they going after that hugely lucrative market called desktop search? I just don't understand the target audience, here.
Microsoft, and everybody else, was beat when the FTC allowed Google to purchase Double-click. What the "competitors" to Google fail to see is that search is a small fraction of what Google does. What brings home the bacon is targeted advertising. If Microsoft could replicate Ad-Sense, or make something bigger and better, they might be able to get back on the playground.
As is, their goose is cooked. Go ahead take over search. Will it stop people from using gmail, google apps (I know this is a non-starter), google earth, youtube? Google is fast becoming a global version of what AOL wanted to be: a walled garden where nobody leaves the google homeworld for other mysterious parts of the internet. Google just owns a very large garden, and the walls are hidden behind the pretty scenery. Also, Google is not as obtuse as AOL, and doesn't treat its users like children until they misbehave and talk smack about Google. Even then, it chooses to behave more rationally than a censorbot.
I'm not exactly a Google fanboi, but I at least have the sense to know that attacking your enemy in a peripheral "market" is not going to drive customers to your site. You need to hit them in the wallet. Google is attempting to take over the desktop. What's Microsoft's response? Try to take over search. Search? No, your enemy is Ad-Sense/Double-Click.
OK, get hacking.
I have worked with various search engines including FAST. As part of my job we (a collective group that I was associated with) had to stress test each of the search engines and make a comparative analysis. The main focus of this testing was Metadata search, a place where a lot of the search engines do badly when you allow complicated open ended queries. In particular, Google's Intranet search is unusable because it cannot do integer or date ranges in an efficient manner.
Of all the engines we tested, FAST was the only one that could guarantee subsecond performance when you performed a search on a collection holding a million documents and the queries had many terms with some terms having substring searches on metadata fields. Every other search engine could not guarantee performance under 30 seconds, let alone subsecond. There is an underlying technology in the FAST search engine which is clearly superior to any other.
The problem that we had with FAST was the large J2EE app sever they insisted on shipping with their solution and the major pain it was to administrate. It was at times a little unstable and some of the administrative activity was unnecessarily arcane. It is because of the J2EE app server wrapper that made me surprised that they were bought by Microsoft. It has been a couple of years since we ran these tests and maybe they have evolved the product a bit.
They are hurting due to poor Vista sales.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
- that Microsoft can't innovate anything on its own, they have to buy it from someone else.
OK, so just to clarify a bit. My company (National Instruments) is a FAST Enterprise Search customer (ESP5) so I can provide a little insight into the product.
FAST is a full featured search engine software product. It's not an Internet search engine, though it used to power alltheweb.com. It is suitable for use powering traditional Web search - we have two FAST installations, and one of them is used purely for search on our external Web site. It is very powerful and customizable; you can create custom dictionaties, taxonomies, et cetera. We have built faceted navigation on top of it and are using it to return little portlets of related links, etc - things we used to use cumbersome database queries to do. Check out http://www.ni.com/dataacquisition/ - the drilldown facets there are driven by FAST working off product metadata. Click through to a specific product page, like http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/203718, and the "resources" tab is a result of a FAST search for manuals, white papers, data sheets, et cetera.
It is also a "much more than just Web page" enterprise search. We have an internal FAST installation that searches Intranet pages, file shares and document repositories of all sorts, Lotus Notes databases, and database tables from our ERP system. It serves as an information gateway to many different sources of information. Documents insert themselves into the engine as they are published out of our CMS. The content indexing pipeline is a completely customizable (in Python) setup, so if you have docs in some proprietary format you need indexed, you can do it. You can tweak the result ranking in many different ways.
There's other companies using FAST for different things - like there's a company in town that's in the email space; they use Fast InStream to index mail immediately as it flows in to make a completely searchable mail repository.
FAST and Autonomy are the leaders in this market. Forrester and Gartner analyst reports agree. We did an extensive evaluation when we moved to FAST several years ago - we had been on Inktomi and then on AltaVista for a time for our enterprise search. FAST was the clear winner.
Though Google is tops in Web search, its search appliance is not competitive - it's very "black box." If you have simple enough search needs that you can just plop down an appliance and have it spider and then use its canned search algorithms, it's fine, but enterprise search needs are usually more complicated than Internet search needs (and the algorithms that make Google good for Internet search tend to not hold up well in an Intranet environment). As a result, serious search developers can't use the Google enterprise product.
sharepoint sux
Okay, Disney is coming to be a Microsoft client, even Jobs is sitting on Disney? Why isn't Steve offering Apple servers and software for Disney?
Or more precisely, "behind" Google.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder if part of the reason Bill is stepping down is because he's seeing the company starting to sink and he'd rather be remembered as the guy they couldn't do without.
Lots of work to do to match the success of Google in - Seach Engines..,
SharePoint's search function is universally hated in my office. So if they decide they need to pull a Microsoft and buy a search engine to replace their existing one - great.
Too bad we dumped them for a MediaWiki site and a Google Search Appliance.
Fast Search is like a competitor to other structured search engines like Autonomy -- they've been around for a lot longer than the August 2007 sale of Convera...
-Stu
A lot of the GSA sales are on the back of large Sharepoint installs, where clients wake up and realise there is no way to find anything. GSA ships with out-of-the-box connectors for Sharepoint. By bundling Fast, they're cutting off this entry point for Google. It's worth it because *any* Google in the enterprise inevitably leads to discussion on Google Apps, and we just can't have that, can we now... :)
J
integrating fast search into their really big JAVA web applications. Now the FAST java API looks like is going to be killed off in favor of a .NUT implementation.
Ha HAA!
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School