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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."
no, the submitter should not have capitalized the 'and' and (optionally) capitalize the A in fast to emphasize the acronym - it should be
FAst Search and Transfer
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.
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.
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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.
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 $1.2bn pricetag seems absurdly high, the purchase makes perfect sense from a business perspective.
The only way in which Microsoft is "going after Google" is that Google could hypothetically choose to develop a similar product. The Google Search Appliance is somewhat similar, although it's not in widespread use, and fills a rather different niche than SharePoint. Unless Google wants to seriously focus on delivering an enterprise-grade version of Google Docs, and providing a heavy-grade search feature to match, the relevance of this story to Google is tenuous at best.
Also, FAST isn't a recursive acronym. It's not even an acronym at all in English (or it'd be FSAT). Given that FAST is based in Norway, I'd guess that the phrase properly spells the acronym in Norwegian (although "fast" probably doesn't exist in the Norwegian lexicon, so I'm not even sure that's explanation either....)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
...download for SP2. I went to Google. Searched the exact same phrase. First like was the download site at microsoft.com There's something to be said about that. If you want a search engine for searching for Microsoft information your best bet would be this:http://www.google.com/microsoft.html
No. Overture bought FAST's *web search* arm. They didn't buy the enterprise search stuff, which was actually FAST's more profitable business, and the only part that could run on Windows. Microsoft bought the enterprise search division, which makes a heck of a lot of sense to integrate in to SharePoint (and integrating web search in to SharePoint would just be stupid).
sigs are a waste of space
The size of Google combined with anti-monopoly / anti-competitive legislation.
1. Even if such a purchase was to go through in the US, it would likely NOT be accepted by the EU (assuming M$ would like non-Americans to use their technology).
2. The financial size of Google would make such a purchase impractical:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GOOG
Google Market Cap: 195.53B
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=msft
M$ Market Cap: 317.80B
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.
As others have pointed out, FAST does not currently provide a public Search Engine which most people associate with the term. They provide the actual engine for their customers, which range from regular, public search engines, to yellow pages providers, inhouse research document indexing, public information indexing (their software is among others deployet as a search services for the norwegian house of representatives, where the representatives and their staff can obtain documentation indexed by several key properties).
.. which bought another division of FAST before that again.. FAST in Trondheim went from being FAST, to Overture and now Yahoo Norway.
Microsoft is buying FAST to get this expertise, to get a software development house which can develop custom solutions for very large customers (think 10-50k employees, where the amount of documents produced are enormous) in a private and personal setting. FAST deliver quite a few consultancy services too, although they've had quite the burn rate lately and downsized a bit recently.
FAST previously showcased their engine as alltheweb.com, their ftpsearch (which was very popular in the late 1998-1999) and were one of the main players in the market when Google launched. The latest "regular" search engine to use FAST in Norway was SESAM, which features a news search, a regular search index, a yellow pages search and several others. They did however recently switch to Yahoo for their regular index. And as other also have mentioned, Yahoo bought overture
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
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.
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.
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.