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73 Comments
- latova, on 01/09/2008, -5/+89I'll be honest I've never heard of FAST until today, and apparently they're a "big player".
- thesutex, on 01/09/2008, -1/+15fast had a searchengine called www.alltheweb.com where they showed off their search tech - yahoo bought it and operates it now
FAST is a big player in corporate search.. - kalleanka, on 01/09/2008, -0/+9"FAST counts Comcast, Disney, Microsoft, Pfizer, UBS and others as customers."
Yes they do have some large customers.
In the early days of web search Fast was one of the major players trying to compete with Altavista. - oooo, on 01/09/2008, -1/+10They're purely an enterprise player. Hence why you've not really heard of them, but they power a lot of the big name websites.
- geekchic, on 01/09/2008, -3/+11Judging by what happened when Google brought Urchin - I would not say that they would automatically be the best choice to buy a company aimed at the enterprise market.
- DarkRabbit, on 01/09/2008, -1/+8So.. a customer is buying their supplier?
WTF? - stalefries, on 01/09/2008, -2/+8That's not very good, then. All of the search services have sucked on big, corporate websites.
- geekchic, on 01/09/2008, -1/+7At one time, they were considered a serious rival to Altavista in the consumer search market as they had some innovative (for those days) search technology.
They seemed to retrench to the corporate market in the face of the Google onslaught though. - triggerfinger, on 01/09/2008, -1/+6As a FAST client I would not underestimate this deal.
- Bidofthis, on 01/09/2008, -0/+4Somebody explain what AllTheWebb is/was it was owned by Fast ... bought (and destroyed) by Yahoo
http://www.alltheweb.com
it was my favorite search engine until Yahoo killed it (err ... i mean bought it) - atdigg, on 01/09/2008, -13/+17Microsoft can be the first in search only if they buy Google.
- dgh1973, on 01/09/2008, -0/+4"I'll be honest I've never heard of FAST until today, and apparently they're a "big player"."
I've heard of them and they are pretty big... they currently run a DoD search engine that has all .gov and .mil domains indexed. This is not a search web site mind you, it's search engine software - you kind of have to be a techie to be familiar with these. If you have heard of Verity (now Autonomy) or Retrievalware, then you would probably know FAST to.
Put it this way, if you searched for jobs on Monster.com, you used the FAST search engine software... I'm pretty sure that's what powers their search. Anyone comparing this to a search website like yahoo or Google is kind of missing the point. - inactive, on 01/09/2008, -1/+5are you pretty deeply involved with the enterprise search market?
- GeneralFailure0, on 01/09/2008, -0/+3Maybe it's FAst Search and Transfer? FAST is a lot more catchy than FSAT.
- oooo, on 01/09/2008, -3/+6Urchin was a whole different game. FAST products would have added significant value to the Google enterprise offerings and could have grown even more as a product range. As opposed to what MS seems to be planning to strip out the core and use it as part of SharePoint and kill off all the other products and platform support.
Also Google and FAST corp culture seems a lot more similar than MS and FAST. - inactive, on 01/09/2008, -3/+6this is actually a good move for the 'soft. they're working hard on search lately, this will help them improve their reach and ability.
- ployd, on 01/09/2008, -0/+3I'm pretty sure they didn't offer 1.2 Billion in CASH.
- INTERNETMASTER, on 01/09/2008, -4/+7shouldn't the acronym for Fast Search and Transfer be FSAT?
- HanSolo69, on 01/09/2008, -0/+3Correction: FAST is a big *underlying* player.
- McMaster88, on 01/09/2008, -1/+3Thanks, I had no idea what the URL was.
So after going to the site, I have no idea how it works...fail. - MasterPlayer, on 01/09/2008, -0/+2Well are you in the enterprise search market?
- sylentmode, on 01/09/2008, -0/+2I disagree, Microsoft is huge and many companies revolve around Microsoft Office, Sharepoint, Documentum, Windows, .NET etc...
These companies are also FAST's customers. Microsoft was not even competing with fast because their only Search product was Sharepoint Server for Search. If your company doesn't use Sharepoint, this is a poor alternative to Omnifind, Endeca, Autonomy, Fast etc...
After a 1.2 billion dollar takeover, I'm sure Microsoft will invest a lot of resources into integrating Fast with all of its Enterprise products and improving on the product.
Google on the other hand is not a competitor as far as Enterprise Search. While they may be selling a decent number of appliances, the appliances are very limited (small capacity, no index sharing across clusters, no api to access relevancy model). But the biggest thing is that the appliance has some beefy hardware but is sold at a very low price so Google is not making a ton off of the hardware. Further, Google does not offer consulting services for implementation, planning or anything. At the same time they spend a lot of resources on troubleshooting the appliances remotely under cheap service contracts. I think the only value that the appliances serve to Google is to keep the brand name alive even while you are at work. - Rsulliv1, on 01/09/2008, -0/+2Major ECM systems such as Documentum use FAST for indexing their content. Most people use it daily without knowing about it. Verity is another large player that has been loosing steam.. They're bundled as a component on the Oracle ECM (formally Stellent), but I hear they're on the way out there as well.
- ajskhan, on 01/09/2008, -4/+6which will NEVER happen.
- spect3r, on 01/09/2008, -2/+4seeing no one has posted it.... http://www.fastsearch.com/
- BuzzFriendly, on 01/09/2008, -3/+5They will wrap it around a Microsoft Bob interface with emoticons. I just can't wait.
- Bidofthis, on 01/09/2008, -1/+3here we go
'In February 2003 the FAST search engine was acquired by Overture for $100m, only 2 weeks after it also snapped up AltaVista for $140m. When Overture was then acquired by Yahoo! shortly afterwards, the search technology was incorporated into the new Yahoo! search engine and today Alltheweb is simply a satellite of Yahoo!, displaying the same search results."
http://www.websearchworkshop.co.uk/fast_history.ph ... - Rsulliv1, on 01/09/2008, -0/+2FAst Search & Transfer
- timbo458, on 01/09/2008, -1/+3The screen name says it all.
- Condoulo, on 01/09/2008, -3/+5The different between MS Windows Live Search, and Google, is Google is simple, it can load even on a dial-up connection still, or if the person has Comcast and they are having a Comcraptic day
While Live Search has been about making it fancy, adding all these useless features. I mean people want to search, not spend all day having to deal with viewing all this eye-candy and search animations.
Thats why Google is, and will always be the leader in search. - Bidofthis, on 01/09/2008, -0/+2Actually the worst company to buy would be Yahoo as demonstrated by their purchase of Alltheweb (owned by fast). Yahoo obliterated that search engine... and damn it .. it was my favorite SE!
- Jobless06, on 01/09/2008, -0/+1who's in the meantime joining DataPortability.org together with Facebook
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/goog-fb-data. ... - turbodiesel, on 01/09/2008, -0/+1it's worked for Microsoft in the past, as well as Google, Apple, Yahoo, IBM, GE, GM, and any other big corp you can name.
Nothing new here. You either invest in developing technology, or you buy it. - Phocion55, on 01/09/2008, -1/+2You're not really gonna need that now anyway....................................................................................................
- inactive, on 01/09/2008, -0/+1but..but...the buries say otherwise
- MrViklund, on 01/09/2008, -0/+1LOL.... Federation...
- BuzzFriendly, on 01/09/2008, -5/+6Microsoft Excels at that ;)
- mightykites, on 01/09/2008, -2/+3Just because Google is better at marketing than FAST doesn't mean they shouldn't be worried. As a search engine, FAST is much, much better than Google right now.
- inactive, on 01/09/2008, -0/+1I don't know what's so 'fancy' or 'complicated' about this, can't see any animations either:
http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true&mkt=en-US
Same goes for search results page. - Archon810, on 01/09/2008, -0/+1FAST is a major, if not biggest, competitor of Autonomy. Have you heard of them?
- jerrysandu, on 01/11/2008, -0/+0Fast anyways did not have a great 2007 and weren't really expected to be profitable through 2008. This move is not much of a surprise
- jerrysandu, on 01/11/2008, -0/+0Google has more than 50% on web search and not in enterprise search. Actually google is a newer player in the enterprise search market
- EEdesigner, on 01/09/2008, -1/+1Microsoft checklist: 1) Everyone does it better - check. 2) We cannot do it better - check. 3) Buy something better - check. The only thing left for Microsoft is 4) Screw it up so that it's just bad as the rest of our crappy code.
- timbo458, on 01/09/2008, -1/+1Missing the point is what a lot of DIGG subscribers do!
- ulrichgilot, on 01/09/2008, -0/+0Microsoft still only represents less than 10% of the search queries. Google has more than 50%.
- Rsulliv1, on 01/09/2008, -1/+1Google Search (it's a separate product) and Apache Lucene are other options of the same vein.
Lucene is an open source option. - McMaster88, on 01/09/2008, -2/+2Anyone heard of http://www.kartoo.com, it isn't the best ever, but its graphical for the few of us that don't like to read text
- jerrysandu, on 01/11/2008, -0/+0I second this. Consolidation is a market trend.
- Rsulliv1, on 01/09/2008, -1/+1losing steam... i know, i know..
- zimmbear, on 01/09/2008, -2/+2I had no idea what fast was so i typed fast.org, and it brings me to a site for - The Federation Against Software Theft. wow
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