Fast Search and Transfer delivers technology to two new Norwegian search engines, with databases that cover the whole web.

The Norwegian company Fast Search and Transfer used to be known for its web search engine All the Web. Fast sold the search engine to Overture, which in its turn was bought by Yahoo! The All the Web search technology is now integrated into the Yahoo Search Engine.

Fast is currently most known for its corporate search technology, software helping companies sort out their own information management problems.

Now Fast is back on the web search scene, although on a much smaller scale than before. No less than two new search engines have been launched on the Norwegian market recently, both of them powered by technology delivered by Fast.

Sesam.no is owned by Schibsted, a Norwegian media company that owns newspapers in several European countries.

Yelo.no has been launched by Findexa , the owner of the Norwegian Yellow pages, and a company that might be bought by another search oriented company shortly – Eniro.

(Eniro is the Internet presence of the Swedish telecom company Telia, originally based on Scandinavia Online (SOL), a company launched by Schibsted. Confusing? You bet!)

One of the reasons for this Norwegian search engine bonanza is that Google has expressed a special interest in this Internet savvy market. These companies would like to present localized search engines for the Norwegian Internet users before google.no becomes something more than a Norwegian language clone of google.com.

Although Yelo and Sesam are both powered by Fast, the international sections of their search engine results are actually different, indicating that they are building separate databases.

Scandinavians may like to take a look at this article on InternetBrus: Sesam - ny norsk söktjänst från Schibsted