Fast searches for different approach
- Article 5 of 25
- Infoconomist, July 2001
Fast's search engine technology is beating off competitors who took the traditional route to build their products.
Most companies that offer search engine technology usually develop a system to determine how relevant documents are to a search, and then try to scale it up to customer requirements.
But the group of researchers from the Norwegian Institute of Technology behind Fast Search & Transfer worked the other way, developing a scalable system for search queries that would accept plug-ins for different kinds of searches.
Now, Fast's unorthodox approach is beating off competitors that took the traditional route. Customers include Internet portal Lycos, which has installed Fast's technology on 41 sites; it is also being piloted for an ecommerce project that needs to process 10,000 search queries per second.
“Corporations have to respond to user demand for information,” says Tom Wilde, vice president of marketing at Fast. “And 80% of users will abandon a site that does not have a good search engine — they won't browse through a site, looking for what they want.”
Fast's products are a mixture of technology and services. For $99 (€116) a month, it will host a search engine and index for a company web site with fewer than 1,000 pages (this group accounts for 80% of companies, estimates Wilde). Alternatively, a company can buy its own version of Fast's search engine, which crawls through two billion web pages every two weeks.
The engine is a three-tier system. The bottom layer aggregates data using an intelligent crawler that goes from web page to web page collecting new and changed data; next is a searching system based on a parallel processing architecture that sorts the pages for relevance using a real-time filtering process; and finally an intelligent presentation layer produces the results for the user.
“A lot of our intellectual property is in the search and filtering mechanism,” says Wilde. The engine supports 46 languages – double the number its competitors support, he claims – and its scalability means that Fast's Internet search system now has 625 million pages catalogued, using only 600 servers compared to Google's 8000. Its customers now include Tiscali, Web.de, KPNQwest, Tibco and Reed Elsevier, which has used it for the world's largest online science search engine.
Fast is listed on Oslo's over-the-counter exchange, but has received $80 million (€93.8 million) in additional funding from private placements since 1999. It is aiming for a full listing soon and will pursue a placement on America's Nasdaq stock exchange once the US market slump abates.
“The vision we have is of Internet 2.0. In the first version, surfing was the paradigm — the Internet was entertainment and corporations viewed the web as an extension of advertising,” says Wilde. “Now users have become very task-driven and the search will become an ecosystem. Everything will be linked together with a big index as a hub, linking corporate site, ecommerce indexes and small sites. It will be an 'information-on-demand' economy,” he says.
None the less, Fast Search & Transfer will still need to overcome a number of strong competitors if it is to dominate in that economy.