Stories about: Fast Search & Transfer

Norwegian police on Thursday charged Fast Search & Transfer with accounting fraud, an enterprise search company bought by Microsoft in January for US$1.2 billion.

Google is releasing a newly architected version of its Search Appliance enterprise search device that can index more than three times as many documents as the current model.

A startup company called Powerset gained a slew of headlines last week when it launched a beta version of its search engine, which like other offerings employs natural language processing, allowing users to search sets of information in the form of questions.

Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, will take over as CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when he leaves the software giant in September.

Microsoft has completed its US$1.2 billion purchase of FAST Search & Transfer and will install the company's CEO as head of a newly formed enterprise search group, it said Friday.

Enterprise search is set to become a pervasive and demanding force in IT over the next several years, according to Gartner analyst Whit Andrews.

IBM has upgraded its high-end enterprise search product with an improved user interface, and will announce next week the availability of a business intelligence tool that can be used with it to analyze call center data.

Yahoo has beefed up its talks with Google as it looks for alternatives to Microsoft's unsolicited US$44.6 billion takeover bid, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Even by the bloated standards of high-tech mergers and acquisitions, Microsoft's proposed purchase of Yahoo appears to be the largest ever among technology firms. It is certainly Microsoft's largest. The company mostly buys smaller firms for less than a billion dollars to fill in gaps in its product lineup. But that may be changing. Last year, for instance, Microsoft bought Seattle online advertising firm aQuantive for US$6 billion, its largest ever until the long-rumored Yahoo deal was unveiled on Friday.

More than a few eyebrows were raised in early January when Microsoft said it would spend US$1.2 billion in cash to buy enterprise search provider Fast Search & Transfer ASA. But Jeffrey Raikes, then Microsoft Business Division president, had to also go and claim that FAST is better than Google when it comes to searching "behind the firewall."

Microsoft plans to acquire Norwegian enterprise search vendor Fast Search & Transfer for US$1.23 billion in order to broaden its enterprise search portfolio.