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Microsoft Buys Search Engine, Going After Google?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Jan 09, 2008 11:00 AM
from the yeah-sure-why-not dept.
Microsoft
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."
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Submission: Microsoft To Overtake Google Search Empire? by obsolete1349 (969869)
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Microsoft Buys Search Engine, Going After Google? 50 Comments More /

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  • That's ok... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cytlid (95255) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:01AM (#21969328) Homepage
    ...I'm going to snipe them and bid 1.3 Billion at the last second.

    • Re:That's ok... (Score:5, Funny)

      by JeepFanatic (993244) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:07AM (#21969428)
      You're assuming that Microsoft doesn't have a proxy bid in place already to outbid you during your snipe attempt.

    • Re:That's ok... (Score:4, Funny)

      by rasputin465 (1032646) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:17AM (#21969616)
      Go for it, you can probably find the thing on ebay...

    • What they are going after... (Score:5, Informative)

      by NSIM (953498) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:38AM (#21969910)
      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.

    • Re:That's ok... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BillGod (639198) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:42AM (#21969968)
      Microsoft needs to buy a search engine. A couple months ago I wanted to download XP SP2 on a pc that I just loaded. Since it was just loaded and I opened IE it defaulted to Microsoft's site. I searched for "windows xp service pack 2". After the 4th link that I clicked on that WAS NOT a 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.
    • 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 financi

      • Re:That's ok... (Score:4, Informative)

        by unlametheweak (1102159) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @12:14PM (#21970514)

        If Microsoft was smart they would just take every availble dollar they have and BUY Google. Why not.. they've bought up all the competition before. Why innovate when you can just buy everyone else's ideas? LOL
        Two reasons:
        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 [yahoo.com]
        Google Market Cap: 195.53B

        http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=msft [yahoo.com]
        M$ Market Cap: 317.80B
            • Google's early success was in building a pared-down, uncluttered and effective search engine portal, with a really damned good link-in to advertising. While everyone else was making their main pages cluttered monstrosities where the advertising they were selling was sublimated into news and interest garbage, making their pages incredibly difficult to read and use, Google figured out that the real secret was the other way around. They very much were "Our job is to search sites for you. You know how to go

              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by unlametheweak (1102159)

                Google's early success was in building a pared-down, uncluttered and effective search engine portal, with a really damned good link-in to advertising. While everyone else was making their main pages cluttered monstrosities where the advertising they were selling was sublimated into news and interest garbage, making their pages incredibly difficult to read and use, Google figured out that the real secret was the other way around. They very much were "Our job is to search sites for you. You know how to go to your news page or your entertainment page, and we don't need to do that for you."

                Yes that's one of the things I was thinking about when posting. Perhaps I should have articulated that point. Larry Page fought for Google being the simple site (on the front end that is) that it is today when asking investors to finance his company (without the picture ads and portal style pages of then leaders like Yahoo). It's the thinking behind Google that makes it innovative, and not just the product itself.

  • Always wins the race in the end.
  • ..... search engine? Why do they need two?

  • Bundle it, eh? Some will say "hooray, more functionality!" Others will cry, "unfair competition!" Microsoft will make more money, more people will stick with a mediocre Microsoft product out of inertia and/or lock-in, and, in other news, the sun will rise.

  • self-recursive acronym (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yuioup (452151) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:10AM (#21969488)
    Microsoft has been using one for quite some time now:

    http://msdn2.microsoft.com/nl-nl/directx/aa937793(en-us).aspx [microsoft.com]

    Q: What does XNA stand for?
    A: XNA's Not Acronymed

  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by teebob21 (947095) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:12AM (#21969522) Journal
    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.
  • 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

    • Re:MS paid too much for bad software (Score:5, Insightful)

      by INeededALogin (771371) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:22AM (#21969688) Journal
      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.

  • And the rats are leaving the ship... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:14AM (#21969552)
    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.

  • No conflict here (Score:3, Funny)

    by shaitand (626655) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:16AM (#21969588) Homepage Journal
    Fast Search And Transfer would be FSAT or FST, not FAST. Microsoft is allowed to have self-recursive acronyms if they are bugged. ;)

  • FAST? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oahazmatt (868057) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:17AM (#21969620) Journal

    Microsoft has just bid 1.2 billion dollars for FAST (Fast Search And Transfer
    Wouldn't that be FSAT?

    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 [live.com] was for?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by yancey (136972)
      I agree completely. Microsoft does not seem to be innovating nor does it seem to have any sharp vision of the future. The consumer is beginning to notice that new versions of Windows and Office don't have much to offer over the old versions and even the free software is catching up. Microsoft does indeed seem to be running scared and buying up any sort of tech in any area of the industry that is the least bit innovative before the competition can get to it. Search, we got that. Games, we got that. Touchscre

  • Didn't someone already buy FAST? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anal Surprise (178723) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:21AM (#21969678)
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/25/overture_buys_fasts_web_search/ [theregister.co.uk]

    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.

    • Re:Didn't someone already buy FAST? (Score:5, Informative)

      by X (1235) <x@xman.org> on Wednesday January 09 2008, @12:08PM (#21970428) Homepage Journal

      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?


      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).

  • I don't get it.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by misleb (129952) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:23AM (#21969696)
    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

    • Re:I don't get it.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by repvik (96666) <slashdot@kynisk.com> on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:38AM (#21969916)
      In the good old days, before Googling became a word, there was competition in the search market. FAST had AllTheWeb.com, and at that time the difference between FAST and Google wasn't big. FAST has had quite a few great minds employed, but Google beat them to the punch. I liked FAST, and I used to work for them maintaining linux and *bsd servers. Great company :)

    • Re:I don't get it.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by snillfisk (111062) <mats@lYEATSindh.no minus poet> on Wednesday January 09 2008, @12:21PM (#21970598) Homepage
      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).

      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 .. which bought another division of FAST before that again.. FAST in Trondheim went from being FAST, to Overture and now Yahoo Norway.

  • FAST is not like Google at all (Score:4, Informative)

    by smallpaul (65919) <(paul) (at) (prescod.net)> on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:29AM (#21969792)
    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.

  • FAST *used* to own AlltheWeb (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dynamoo (527749) * on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:36AM (#21969874) Homepage
    FAST used to own AlltheWeb [alltheweb.com] until they sold it in 2003. Up until that point, AlltheWeb was the only search engine that I'd seen that could rival Google for the quality of search results. Eventually, it ended up in the hands of Yahoo! who killed the engine off (as they did with AltaVista).

    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.

  • Bad Summary! (Score:5, Informative)

    by moosesocks (264553) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @11:47AM (#21970060) Homepage
    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....)

  • Chaos in the the Enterprise Search market (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ccleve (1172415) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @12:04PM (#21970352)

    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

  • No, Google shouldn't be worried (Score:3, Informative)

    by treerex (743007) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @12:18PM (#21970562) Homepage
    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.

  • Point of Order. (Score:3, Informative)

    by DaveV1.0 (203135) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @12:25PM (#21970646) Journal

    Fast Search And Transfer [Microsoft to use a self-recursive acronym?]


    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.

  • Microsoft, terror of the seven seas! (Score:5, Funny)

    by 6-tew (1037428) on Wednesday January 09 2008, @12:29PM (#21970714)

    "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!"

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