Race 2008 – Search

Microsoft just announced that they will try to acquire Fast Search & Transfer, which is a Norwegian enterprise search solution. The deal is reportedly in excess of $1 billion and is dependent on FS&T shareholder approval. The big three in search, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have been locked in this search battle for some time with Google taking the lion's share of the users.

As many have predicted, Microsoft was destined to make some move to close the gap between itself and the relative Google monopoly that exists. In my opinion this "search" battle will only intensify this year with hakia, Powerset and other alternative search entities ramping up to provide better solutions. As for this acquisition, it appears that Microsoft is putting on assets that can deliver high relevance, and I can only assume that these will be modified or integrated into some superior form of refined search.

Fast Search appears to be a highly focused and tailored solution to basically the relevance and advertising aspect of search, and given hakia's recent funding for semantic advertising development, I ca only deduce that search will be the big story for 2008.

Fast Forward

From what I can gather about Fast Search, the company seems to be at the leading edge of search as it applies to industry and business and the FASTForward '08 conference is indicative that search is a paramount issue for many industry sectors and users as well. Examining some of Fast Search's white papers reveals a rather open corporate idea of exactly what the company is focused on, and also some insight into the way search is carried out by Google and other search entities. The gist of Fast's approach can be summed up with the following excerpt from one of these papers: "In General, look for systems that offer a tunable relevancy model, and a mechanism by which to favor precision over recall." In essence this means new systems designed for extremely high relevance and scale.

The End All Search

Whether we are talking about semantic search, natural language search, advanced algorithms or combinations of these approaches the end of the rainbow is relevance. Fast Search is not unlike any of the leading companies dealing with this issue in that all of them are about "crunching" data to render better results. There is also the advertising and marketing aspect to be considered and it is obvious that hakia, Powerset, and now Microsoft are taking direct aim at Google's model for monetization as well.

It is possible that the greatest challenger to Google will be the company that provides the best overall model rather than simply the one that renders the best results. In the end, the perception and needs of the end users will elect our most used search mechanism and the really smart companies are in tune with this fact. Search Wikia, hakia, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others crunch the same data in different ways, but methodology is not near so important as relevance and value, in both search results and desirable advertising.

The Race to Come

I have covered Powerset, hakia and Wikia Search more extensively than many might remember, and I have always been a proponent of some collaboration between these companies. The relative CEO's of these fantastic innovations are people I call friends and it is becoming apparent that their visions are on the doorstep of becoming reality. As Fast Search's pages reflect, crunching vast amounts of data into highly usable query results is basically what the game is all about.

I think that Powerset will likely be acquired by either Microsoft or perhaps even Google in an effort to shortcut the winning product, and hakia (even with relatively minimal funding) may well render the most sophisticated end product. Wikia retains the so far unused variable of the ultimate data cruncher in the contributors that filter data there. Perhaps the end all filtering agent for tomorrow's search will be a human being after all. Regardless, we are in for some interesting times in search technology this year. Let the game begin!