The Fast search engine expands in Europe

The Norwegian search engine company Fast conquers new search avenues in Europe.

October 4 2001, updated the same day.

One of the more troublesome parts of being an Internet searcher is identifying your search engine. Some of the results you get when searching the Yahoo! directory is actually from the Google search engine. A lot of Internet service providers and portals provide their own search engines carrying their own brand, even if the results are produced by another search engine.

The Norwegian search engine company, Fast, has its own search site at www.alltheweb.com. Search experts know it's there, but it is definitely not one of the most visited search tools on the Net. Google, on the other hand, has become one of the major search sites in its own right.

Nevertheless, Fast is probably Google's most serious competitor right now. NBCi and Go are gone, Excite is dying. Inktomi is still going strong, providing data to powerful sites like AOL and MSN, but nevertheless, Fast is the only major search engine apart from Google that is expanding at the moment. How is that possible?

Fast has cashed in two major victories during the last year. The first was becoming the main search result provider for the popular Lycos portal. Now you'll get Fast results not only on the American version of Lycos, but also in Europe and Asia.

Europe is obviously a much more confusing search engine landscape than the US. You will find people using the international versions of the major search sites here as well, including Yahoo.com and Google.com, but a large proportion of searchers go to localized versions of the major search engines or to local brands.

Being a European search engine, Fast has become very good at conquering the European market, delivering data to more and more search sites across the continent.

Recently it was decided that the European version of the Infoseek search engine will be abandoned. Fast will now power the search engine on the home page on Germany's major Internet service provider, T-online. This is definitely the most important portal in the country.

Fast's biggest reach in Europe is Germany (T-online, Lycos.de, Web.de) followed by Britain, France and Spain. Scandinavia and Russia are also important markets. Some reckon that Fast controls over 75 percent of the search traffic generated by "pure" European search engines

This is important for Fast, not only because the search services bring in revenue in their own right. This global reach also makes the search engine more attractive to search engine optimizers and marketing experts, willing to pay to get their sites re-indexed at daily intervals.

In a volatile market this kind of success may also placate investors, thus resquing Fast from the dot com graveyard.

Webmasters who want to reach European searchers, must take Fast very seriously indeed. This also applies to American sites targeting a global market.

Fortunately, Fast has one search engine index only. Although searchers may sort results according to language, this means that by being included in the Fast index, your site will be listed on all these various search sites and portals.

As reported earlier by Pandia, Fast is now preparing a new and much larger database, presumably the largest ever. A test spider is already surfing the Net, building this new index of some 1.8 billion pages.

A larger search index does not necessarily give better results. The psychological effect is important, though, and may give Fast a boost in its struggle with Google. Google now reports an index of 1.6 billion pages. That number includes links to pages where the full text has not been included in the database, however.

Although Fast is advancing on the technological front, its problems are not over. It recently let go of some 60 employees. New CEO is former Technology Director John M. Leirvik, who took over after Rob Fisher earlier this fall. On October 1 Fast announced that it will cut another 15 million US dollars, including the so-called mobile unit.

Fast to power Germany's largest ISP and portal (Fast press release)
Pandia's new Fast AlltheWeb search syntax q-card
Fast Partnersite registration
Rencke's list of Fast search partners around the world (Webmaster World), see also here.

More search engine news...

The Pandia Post is our free bimonthly newsletter on Internet searching, search engines and directories.

We will give you the latest news from the world of Internet exploring, useful tips on how to improve your searching skills or search engine ranking, as well as information on the development of the Pandia Search Central.

We will never give your address to any other company or organization.