This morning (central European time) it was announced that Microsoft wants to buy the Norway based enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer.

According to Forbes, Microsoft has offered “a cash tender offer for 19.00 Norwegian kroner (NOK) per share. This offer represents a 42 percent premium to the closing share price on Jan. 4, 2008 (the last trading day prior to this announcement), and values the fully diluted equity of FAST at 6.6 billion NOK (or approximately $1.2 billion U.S.).”

The Fast stock had a surge once this news was announced. 19 NOK is not a high course for Fast stock from a historic perspective. Two years ago it was 26 NOK, but this last year has been hard on Fast.

“This is a sad day, but Fast is in good hands and I think the company will flourish more with Microsoft than it would alone,” says board member Robert Keith to the Norwegian news site E24.

Fast’s board recommends Microsoft’s offer and it has already been accepted by 37 percent of the shareholders.

UPDATE:

The Norwegian web site Dagens IT refers to Fast CEO Jon Markus Lervik: “This is very exciting for us. We will now have the combination of the world’s best [search] technology and the world’s largest software company.”

He says that Fast has been discussing a possible acquisition with Microsoft since May last year.

Fast once had one of the best web search engines on the planet. AlltheWeb was first bought by Overture, and then Overture was bought by Yahoo!

Yahoo! did not manage to make much use out of the Fast technology, however. Yahoo! had no less than three search engine platforms at the time: Inktomi, AltaVista and Alltheweb, and they chose to stick primarily to the Inktomi technology, mainly because the development team was in the US.

Yahoo’s acquisition of AlltheWeb was an opportunity lost for Microsoft, which instead went on to develop its own search engine from scratch. MSN Search — now Live Search — did never become a huge success.

Since selling AlltheWeb, Fast has focused primarily on the enterprise search market (search engines for company databases, websites and intranets). They have, however, from time to time delivered regular search engine technology, like for the Norwegian Sesam portal. In other words: they still have the skills needed to help Microsoft develop its web search technology.

Whether they will do so, remains to be seen. Microsoft could also choose to use Fast for the development of future enterprise search solutions only.

Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, says that “Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people find, use and share critical business information quickly…. The combination of Microsoft and Fast gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs.”

ANOTHER UPDATE (Jan 9 2008):

Gary Price over at Resourceshelf has made a timeline of some of what FAST has been up to since getting rid of AllTheWeb.