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Microsoft Buys Search Engine, Going After Google?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday January 09, @11:00AM
from the yeah-sure-why-not dept.
from the yeah-sure-why-not dept.
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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Microsoft Buys Search Engine, Going After Google?
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That's ok... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's ok... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's ok... (Score:4, Funny)
What they are going after... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What they are going after... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's ok... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's ok... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.google.com/microsoft.html [google.com]
Re:That's ok... (Score:4, Informative)
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
Recursive acronym... but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Is it just me, or did they spell FSAT... er, FAST... wrong?
Re:Recursive acronym... but... (Score:5, Informative)
FAst Search and Transfer
Dyslexic Recursive Acronym (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Recursive acronym... but... (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's just Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
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.
The turtle (Score:2)
Thought MS already had a Google beating ........ (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, yes, the ol' bundling trick... (Score:2)
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)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/nl-nl/directx/aa937793(en-us).aspx [microsoft.com]
Q: What does XNA stand for?
A: XNA's Not Acronymed
Re:self-recursive acronym (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait - nobody cares. Nevermind.
Re:self-recursive acronym (Score:5, Funny)
Re:self-recursive acronym (Score:5, Insightful)
(or Movies, your choice)
Re:self-recursive acronym (Score:5, Funny)
Re:self-recursive acronym (Score:4, Funny)
OK, somebody else try to do better.
Great (Score:5, Funny)
MS paid too much for bad software (Score:2, Insightful)
-i
Re:MS paid too much for bad software (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Funny, that.
do these aquisitions make sense? (Score:2)
That's what I don't understand about these big tech buyouts. Typically there's a culture clash between the smaller company and the big corporation, the developers get upset and leave to go find a place that's fun again. Even if they stay, the managers from the larger company have to start marking territory like alpha dogs and efficiency falls apart. It seems to be impossible for managers to come in and say "Hey, you guys know what you're doing, all we're going to do is get your manager up to speed on HR and our accounting codes. Aside from that, keep on doing what you were doing that made you worth buying in the first place. That is all." If you drive all the developers away, all you're left with is software you don't understand and a huge learning curve for getting up to speed.
I suppose there's the cynical rationalization for this sort of deal, like HP buying Compaq. It was a really dumb match but Carly Fiorina and her top executives would get some fat bonuses for guiding such a huge deal to completion -- so from the perspective of her pocketbook, the deal was a huge win.
No conflict here (Score:3, Funny)
FAST? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
This is Microsoft Innovating ! (Score:2)
Jay! Keep innovating Microsoft!
Didn't someone already buy FAST? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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)
-matthew
Re:I don't get it.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I don't get it.... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Microsoft is now its own customer (Score:2, Interesting)
FAST in the UK (Score:1, Funny)
FAST is not like Google at all (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FAST is not like Google at all (Score:5, Informative)
ROI on that? (Score:2)
They will pay 1.2 billion for that. That looks like quite some ROI to me.
MS fails in every online business but Xbox (Score:2)
Honestly, Redmond has started and stopped and shoveled money into a furnace for what 5, 6, 7 different 'strategic' online eSomething something acquisitions? They SUUUUUUCCCCKKKK at this.
Microsoft is a company that's genetically averse to partnering with anyone. Everything has to be Microsoft branded Microsoft operated and Microsoft micromanaged. What makes anyone think that they won't screw this up too?
The sole exception is XBox Live because frankly, Redmond's own ignorance works to their advantage here. They recognize they really don't know WTF they're doing so they basically stay out of the way.
FAST *used* to own AlltheWeb (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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....)
Couple Recurring Misconceptions (Score:1)
2) Microsoft paid for and bought an Enterprise search engine, not an internet search engine. As has already been pointed out, their internet search engine was bought by Overture. Similar to how Ultraseek's internet engine was bought by Yahoo, and their enterprise search was bought by Verity (now Autonomy).
FAST actually has a fairly strong presence in the enterprise search market, and beat out the Google appliance in terms of features and management when I last looked at it a couple of years ago.
Microsoft should buy Miva. (Score:1)
For about $45 million they could get a perpetual license to FAST's software and the stack of 500 DL 380s it's currently sitting on.
Going after? (Score:1)
Chaos in the the Enterprise Search market (Score:3, Interesting)
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
FAST vs Lucene (Score:2)
Required Security Update ? (Score:1)
I made a typo in the Internet Explorer address bar just yesterday and was redirected to Live Search. Funny thing is I had explicitly set "do not search from address bar" but that mysteriously changed after a recent Microsoft update. I guess this was a needed (financial) security update (for Microsoft).
No, Google shouldn't be worried (Score:3, Informative)
Short Answer: (Score:1)
They go after EVERYBODY...
Sharepoint !competing with Google (Score:1)
From what I've seen, Sharepoint will benefit from searching capability a great deal, and although it pains me to say this, Sharepoint is actually a half decent product in its own right.
Point of Order. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
I know the answer - but they dont! (Score:2)
Microsoft, terror of the seven seas! (Score:5, Funny)
"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!"
Not going after Google (Score:2)
Read about Google - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Enterprise_products [wikipedia.org]
Apart from the keyword "search", there's very few similarities at all. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is in it's own genre it would appear.
Do they run Linux? (Score:1)
Microsoft implements self recursive acronyms. (Score:2)
Not a recursive acronym (Score:2)
Recursive Retardedness (Score:1)
Microsoft already has a search engine. (Score:1)
How does this change anything? (Score:1)
Microsoft, and everybody else, was beat when the FTC allowed Google to purchase Double-click. What the "competitors" to Google fail to see is that search is a small fraction of what Google does. What brings home the bacon is targeted advertising. If Microsoft could replicate Ad-Sense, or make something bigger and better, they might be able to get back on the playground.
As is, their goose is cooked. Go ahead take over search. Will it stop people from using gmail, google apps (I know this is a non-starter), google earth, youtube? Google is fast becoming a global version of what AOL wanted to be: a walled garden where nobody leaves the google homeworld for other mysterious parts of the internet. Google just owns a very large garden, and the walls are hidden behind the pretty scenery. Also, Google is not as obtuse as AOL, and doesn't treat its users like children until they misbehave and talk smack about Google. Even then, it chooses to behave more rationally than a censorbot.
I'm not exactly a Google fanboi, but I at least have the sense to know that attacking your enemy in a peripheral "market" is not going to drive customers to your site. You need to hit them in the wallet. Google is attempting to take over the desktop. What's Microsoft's response? Try to take over search. Search? No, your enemy is Ad-Sense/Double-Click.
OK, get hacking.
Evil with Evil ? (Score:1)
FAST is fast (Score:2)
Of all the engines we tested, FAST was the only one that could guarantee subsecond performance when you performed a search on a collection holding a million documents and the queries had many terms with some terms having substring searches on metadata fields. Every other search engine could not guarantee performance under 30 seconds, let alone subsecond. There is an underlying technology in the FAST search engine which is clearly superior to any other.
The problem that we had with FAST was the large J2EE app sever they insisted on shipping with their solution and the major pain it was to administrate. It was at times a little unstable and some of the administrative activity was unnecessarily arcane. It is because of the J2EE app server wrapper that made me surprised that they were bought by Microsoft. It has been a couple of years since we ran these tests and maybe they have evolved the product a bit.
Proving once again - (Score:2)
About the FAST Engine (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [ni.com] - 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 [ni.com], 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.
Disney (Score:1)
The keyword is "after" (Score:2)
Are they hungry? (Score:1)
SharePoint search couldn't get worse... (Score:2)
Too bad we dumped them for a MediaWiki site and a Google Search Appliance.
some friends of mine just finished (Score:1)
Re:...hmmm.... (Score:1)
Major share holder can be any size, even 1% or less, as long as it's a bigger chunk than what most shareholders hold.