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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
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.
Google has enterprise search engines: the Google Search Appliance.
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
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
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