Just wrote about this subject the other day in I wonder what is behind Microsoft's buying of FAST? and now…. Computerworld comes up with THIS POST -Is FAST enterprise search better than Google's?
"….During a conference call after announcing plans to buy Norwegian enterprise search provider Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) for $1.2 billion, Microsoft's Raikes said that Internet search is all about "the number of hits to a particular site," referring to part of Google's vaunted PageRank search algorithm that favors documents that are clicked or viewed often by placing them higher in its results.
How popular is a document "doesn't matter inside a corporate intranet," Raikes continued, "where you have to look at the relevance algorithm to help the business user. That's what FAST has."
In his blog, independent search analyst Stephen Arnold appeared to agree with Raikes' characterization, though he did not come to a conclusion over whether FAST or Google was superior."
For one thing, the acquisition of FAST by Microsoft suggests Microsoft wants to get into Enterprise Search - and they're clearly not there (until now) - but it also suggests that Enterprise Search has been such a lousy experience, for so many companies (including IBM, BTW, that uses FAST …. so I'm not sure how much improvement one's going to see using the new "Micro" FAST Enterprise Search.
I think the problem is not as much with the Search Engine - it's with the way the content is created in the Enterprise - the CMS systems and the way it's written, make it really hard both to categorize properly, in the way it could be found well. I don't know that using FAST can combat lousy categorization or a lousy set up CMS … but that's just me.
Maybe FAST has developed some technology that can people locate IBM offerings - but when I was IBM, using the FAST engine - I had a hard time finding anything.
But that's just me.
But here's the sentence that gives away the real reason for the aquisition:
"….Lervik said FAST can also search "behavioral data" and help connect people to experts and colleagues, which sounded an awful lot to me like the sort of 'social network analysis' performed by the National Security Agency (NSA) among others as a form of sophisticated data mining.
So do you buy Microsoft and FAST's claims to superior technology? And how about FAST's possible sideways moves?"
If FAST really can do this stuff, above, they're probably worth buying for 1.2 Billion, that's my opinion- and certainly, Enterprise Search could use some help.
