

MS Bids $1.2B To Buy Norwegian Search Company - kirubakaran
http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/ROC.20080108.2008-01-08T133446Z_01_L08643721_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESS-FAST-MICROSOFT-COL/GIStory/

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mooneater
MS desperately needs an internal search tool for their own enterprise info.
You simply cant find anything on their intranet, its shocking. This is made
worse by constant employee churn and re-orgs.

It would literally be worth the price to MS if all Fast did was help MS get
its act together internally!

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kirubakaran
Instead of a $1,200,000,000 solution for that issue, here is a $50,000
solution for them that is even better! :-)

<http://www.googlestore.com/appliance/product.asp?catid=2>

$50K version indexes one million documents.

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marvin
You're forgetting that in this dimension, Steve Ballmer has his board
brainwashed: You don't use an iPod, and you don't use Google.

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qvtqht
I think everyone here has heard of FAST...

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ntoshev
What is "enterprise internet search"?

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tx
I do not believe the article mentioned internet, but enterprise search is a
big problem to solve. It is estimated that only about 20% of useful corporate
data is stored in appropriate formats, i.e. databases. The rest is spread
across thousands employee computers in form of word documents, text files,
html files, PDFs, etc.

I have not heard of this norvegian company, but I have heard of startups
tackling the problem of distributed search across "clowds" of enterprise PCs:
each computer is running an agent and listens to a server for commands. A
typical use case: a company is being sued over something, so a management may
issue a command of searching for lawsuit-related keywords on ALL computers
(laptops included) of all employees. The results can be collected, analyzed
and even remotely deleted on all PCs.

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ntoshev
The article did mention internet and that got me confused. Thanks. Here is the
company site for reference: <http://www.fastsearch.com/>

