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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
..... 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.
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.
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.
A company that is incapable of profiting from its products normally indicates that the product is lacking.
or...
the market is saturated
the market is not ready
the company can't market
If the technology is good then Microsoft probably wants to use it and prevent Yahoo, Google and others from buying it.
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
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.
Google has enterprise search engines: the Google Search Appliance.
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
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.
"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!"