Slashdot Mirror
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
I'm thinking FAst Search and Transfer...FAST...
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
..... search engine? Why do they need two?
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
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.
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.
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 ...
How about the recursive marketing? Microsoft can bundle FAST [for] its soon-to-be-customers Comcast, Disney, Microsoft, Pfizer, and UBS.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
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.
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
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
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.
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.
And by not screwing up, do you mean that they're actually making money, or losing $6billion over the past few years also count as not screwing up?
Damn, I *SO* majorly didn't screw up last year, only went over my budget by a couple of million.
"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!"
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.
Just curious, but to be a recursive acronym shouldn't it be "FAST Search and Transfer". Otherwise wouldn't the word Fast simply be a synonym for speedy?
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.