FAST Search [ http://www.fastsearch.com/ ], headquartered in Oslo, Norway with offices in the US and Europe, continues to make strides in the search engine business, solidifying itself as a leading search engine technology for both the mass consumer audience and enterprise clients. The company has just "relaunched" AlltheWeb.com, its showcase public search engine portal, with a host of handy new features.

In the consumer Internet search space, FAST joins a very short list of leading "spider engines." Today there are really only four spider engines of any significance: Google, AltaVista, Inktomi, and FAST. All four promise to index a massive number (billions) of web pages, to filter spam, and to provide superior query relevance in their ranking algorithms. All four deliver on these promises, more or less.

What about the relative *importance* of each? That is, how many searches are actually performed by consumers using these engines directly or indirectly through portal partners? As most know, Google is the clear leader. Consumers are flocking to the Google site proper, and many are clicking on the Google results that appear on Yahoo, as well.

Our sense of AltaVista is that it is dropping like a stone in terms of overall popularity, though the official metrics may not confirm this just yet. Once a favorite of serious researchers because of its many customization options, relatively frequent crawls, and large index, it is being surpassed even in its areas of relative strength, by Google and, you guessed it, FAST. Arguably, hindsight being 20-20, AltaVista started losing its position in this industry (driven as it is by major portals' traffic) when Yahoo dropped it in favor of Inktomi (later dropping Ink for Google).

Inktomi gets the nod, for now, as a distant second to Google in terms of their exposure to a mass consumer audience, for the simple reason that its index is part of the mix of determinants of search results on two of the top three portals, AOL and MSN, both of which have a strong global reach. Inktomi still powers Hotbot, as well, though the Hotbot search engine is no longer widely used.

FAST is still an unfolding story. In terms of global consumer exposure, it's probably only third or even fourth. But it's likely going to remain a strong third for some time (assuming it decisively surpasses AltaVista at some point in the future) by virtue of its relationship with #4 portal Terra Lycos (FAST powers Lycos Search).

In terms of sheer product quality, a subjective issue to be sure, FAST is getting well deserved raves. The relevance of the top results continues to improve. Kevin Elliott ["Alltheweb Takes on Google, and Wins!," http://websearch.about.com/library/searchtips/bltotd011112.htm] goes so far as to assert that "for searches related to news and current events, it blows the conventional wisdom about Google right out of the water," and based on the demo I walked through and a little experimentation of my own, I'd be hard pressed to disagree.

Test drives of search engines, even tests of short duration, tend to expose major flaws quickly, mainly because we tend to type in queries we've had trouble with in the past on topics or product categories that mean a lot to us. The quality of results tended to be mixed, frankly, but in some cases this seems to be traceable to a continued lack of attention to basic truth in labeling by web sites we really *want* to find! A few quirks were found here and there. A very specific golf-related search turned up only one result, and it was rather odd: a redirect from a long multi-hyphenated domain name with some garbled copy on the page to a product review page on Bizrate.com. Does this mean that Bizrate or their marketing consultant has been *cloaking*? If so, they should stop it! Or FAST should stop it. Redirects for the purposes of ranking higher in search engines are a form of spam in most cases.

There is still too much spam in the index, judging at least from my quick peek at it. The #2 result overall in a search for "camping gear" returns a site of dubious quality which has used "keyword stuffing" in its meta description (simply describing the site with keywords instead of writing a concise description).

One tends to run into less of this kind of tomfoolery when researching current events and serious topics. A search for "human genome project" (without the quotes) exposes a few of FAST's helpful new capabilities. The "rewrite" feature converts typed words such as human genome project into phrase searches ("human genome project") for known commonly-searched phrases. A search for "who is the who" would baffle most search engines, but FAST rewrites both "who is" and "the who" as commonly searched phrases, allowing more actual sites about "The Who" to be found. In the genome example, the search engine does a nice job of bringing up related topic categories and multimedia search results, as well.

The most exciting aspects of the FAST relaunch are indeed add-on features like news search. Results are ranked by relevancy, and the results also tell exactly how fresh the news story is. Unlike "regular" search results, news results are very fresh, sometimes having been indexed only minutes ago. The secret here is maintaining a smaller, frequently-crawled index of between three and four thousand major news sources around the globe. These sources have been hand-selected by editorial staff at FAST. News search is one amongst several features that likely translate very well to the enterprise.

FAST doesn't expect to make the majority of their revenues from the AlltheWeb site, which is mainly there as a showcase. Although there is targeted advertising on the site, it isn't particularly intrusive. Essentially, on Alltheweb.com, search rules - which is more than you can say for a search emanating from Lycos.com, which returns three Overture paid results above the same list of FAST results as you'd see on the AlltheWeb.com site. The company's primary focus, at least from a revenue standpoint, seems to be on powering site search for major corporate clients such as IBM.com and eBay, although there is plenty of untapped potential in the area of powering major consumer portals, too, especially in Europe where FAST now powers T-Online and Tiscali in addition to Lycos; in fact, according to Rob Pruitt, General Manager of the company's Internet division, FAST claims the distinction of being the "#1 provider of OEM search to Europe." FAST's annual revenues are $35 million and growing.

As any doctoral-level schoolboy knows, to be granted a Ph.D. requires the preponderance of members of the thesis examining committee to affirm that the candidate has contributed "significant advances" in their chosen field of study. Amongst FAST's 200 employees, 150 are engineers, 30 of these holding Ph.D.'s. For this group, "significant advances" are a way of life. We expect to see FAST reach many more milestones, but no doubt we sceptical members of the "examining committee" will continue make them jump through a few hoops along the way.