The potential of this deal has me very interested. This could place DELL's site in front of millions of more eyeballs. Relatively low capital upfront. Almost as big as the TN deal maybe. Like to hear about this at earnings.
GOODBYE ALTA VISTA!!! CPQ should have sold that months ago.
Fez
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Fast, Dell Team to Build World's Biggest Search Engine Service; Super-fast, Low-cost System Designed to Scale with Explosive Web Growth
BOSTON and ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 4, 1999--
Offers 80 Million Searchable Documents Today;
200 Million Targeted for Summer 1999, Quest for Entire Web
Fast Search & Transfer(TM) (FAST(TM)), owner of highly advanced search engine technology, today announced that it has teamed with Dell Computer Corporation (Nasdaq:DELL), the world's leading direct computer systems company, to build a next-generation search engine service powered by Dell systems.
The two companies, initially leveraging a strong supplier/customer relationship, have constructed an advanced search capability using a high-performance, low-cost software/hardware system able to search virtually the entire Web in response to every request, with outstanding speed and relevance of results. FAST plans to offer this new search engine service via OEM agreements with major portals and partnerships with destination sites, and has begun discussions with Dell about how the FAST Search technology can be exposed to Dell customers.
Today the new FAST Search(TM) service -- running on Dell(R) PowerEdge(R) 4300 servers and Dell PowerVault(TM) storage systems -- offers users 80 million searchable documents at the Web address alltheweb.com. This makes the new service "larger than several of today's leading search engines," according to Danny Sullivan, editor, Search Engine Watch.
FAST aims to expand this search universe aggressively by leveraging its uniquely scalable architecture to offer end users the world's biggest search engine, with more than 200 million searchable documents available worldwide by summer 1999. Beyond this milestone, FAST plans to take on the challenge of growing the search service until the current contents of the entire Web are captured, cataloged and available worldwide. Forrester Research, a leading industry research firm, estimates the World Wide Web currently contains 500 to 600 million documents.
"Several of today's major search engines have not increased significantly in size for over a year," said Sullivan. "If FAST can offer a search solution that can both keep pace with the growth of the Web and provide relevant results, it will become a significant player in the search marketplace."
Once FAST has captured and cataloged the Web's current information resource, the company plans an aggressive discovery and cataloging program to remain in synch with the explosive growth of the Web, which Forrester Research predicts will grow to be one billion documents by 2000.
"Size isn't everything; but if you can have both size and relevancy, then you are able to please all types of users," said Sullivan. "General web surfers and research professionals can both be served. Moreover, as the web continues to grow, search engines must index a sizeable number of the documents available. The announcement from FAST adds new pressure for search engines to be both biggest and best."
Good News for End-Users
Web users count on search engines to locate all relevant pages and automatically rank the best information in the first or second screen of search results. What many users don't realize is that some of today's major portals may search as little as 10 percent of the Web with each query(1). This problem is exacerbated because some of the current search engine solutions, while having advanced rapidly, have trouble keeping up with the weed-like proliferation of new documents on the Web. As a result, users may well be missing the very Web site "gems" they are looking for because their search engine doesn't offer a complete search of the World Wide Web. The FAST Search service aims to change all of that.
"FAST is delivering, on our powerful standards-based server and storage systems, a scalable search engine technology that can search the entire contents of the Web and offer the retrieval speed and relevance users want," said Michael Lambert, senior vice president of Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. "We are also excited about the longer-term prospects for this kind of search technology in corporate computing environments, where intranet home pages are beginning to be considered portal-like and in need of search engine technology that increases and facilitates access to information."
Big Search, More Cost-Effective Power for Portals
Today's e-commerce destination sites and portals need more search capability than ever before. Unlike other parts of the industry where having 'more' means the price goes down, the cost of building and running a search engine tends to go up as the information resource on the Web gets bigger and transaction rates get higher. The FAST Search service, using an advanced distributed architecture based on an ever-expanding array of commercially available PowerEdge servers and PowerVault storage systems, scales linearly so that the second or third hundred million documents can cost the same to build and make available as the first hundred million. By leveraging the reliability, power, and price/performance of Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerVault storage systems, FAST can build a search infrastructure that keeps up with the tremendous growth of the Web for a fraction of the cost typically associated with this effort. The ultimate beneficiary of the cost-efficient FAST architecture is the consumer, since it enables FAST to take on the challenge of building a search of the entire Web.
"FAST has proven that Dell's technology platform easily scales to support the most demanding applications while offering the 24x7 mission-critical operational support needed for a major portal infrastructure," said Espen Brodin, president and CEO of FAST.. "Searching 'All the Web, All the Time(TM)' means that FAST Search will never stop growing, and that means we are depending on Dell to always deliver us the best price/performance and most reliable servers available. By working closely with Dell, we hope to expose a significant number of Dell customers to the benefits of FAST Search."
How FAST Works: "Organic" Application Architecture Grows with Web
Founded in 1997, Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) was the brainchild of several Ph.D. students and professors from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The FAST founders believed the industry lacked a search technology custom-designed for the unique challenge of finding, cataloging, and retrieving the vast amounts of changing information from the Web.
"Most inventors of search solutions were attempting to build their new architectures using conventional ideas of parallel data processing, or based on large million dollar-class servers that are expensive to upgrade and support," said John M. Lervik, chief technology officer of FAST. "We set about rebuilding this software from the ground up, and it was critical that it meet two basic criteria: being capable of scaling non-stop with Web growth -- infinitely if necessary -- and that it run on standards-based hardware to keep the platform cost as low as possible.
"The FAST team's conceptual breakthrough was inventing a software approach that transformed the Web search engine from an inactive 'non living' application into an 'organic' application that continues to grow every day as new Web sites are added." Lervik continued, "Crucial to this organic application approach are several innovations: a search engine architecture that scales linearly both in data volume and traffic; high capacity spidering combined with ultra-fast indexing algorithms to assure fresh, up-to-date content; highly efficient search engine kernel software that utilizes every ounce of PC server performance; and large arrays of standard-based servers, storage systems, and interconnects to achieve a low cost."
For more information about Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell PowerVault storage systems go to dell and dell.com. For more information on FAST and its products, visit the FAST World Wide Web site at www.fast.no.
About Fast Search & Transfer ASA
Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST), headquartered in Oslo, Norway, and with US and UK subsidiaries, is a high-technology research and development company delivering advanced and innovative search and image/video compression technologies for intranets, extranets, and the Internet. The company develops and markets fully scalable cost-efficient software and hardware, ranging from small and mid-size solutions to solutions for the largest Internet content providers and media companies. Applications include the world's largest search engines and the highest performance image compression technology available for the Internet. FAST is traded on the OTC market in Oslo, Norway. |
