The future of Fast

This week Fast will introduce another update of its AllTheWeb search site. Pandia takes a closer look at the Norwegian search engine company.

November 10 2001.

On Monday November 12 Fast introduces several new and improved features on its AllTheWeb search engine (see separate article).

Pandia has discussed this latest update with Rob Rubin, executive vice president and general manager of Fast's Internet division, and asked him a few questions about the future of Fast.

Like Pandia, Fast is a Norwegian enterprise. It was created by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim and the research staff is still in Norway.

It says a lot about the Norwegian mentality that the fact that the country has given birth to one of the major search engines on the Net is not widely discussed at home.

This may be partly caused by the fact that AllTheWeb is not a well know search site in any part of the world. Fast's success is mainly caused by the fact that it feeds search results to a lot of large Internet portals around the globe, including various variants of Lycos and big European portals like the German T-Online.

On the other hand, this lack of interest may also be due to the Norwegian inability to understand that we actually have a knowledge intensive economy, supported by heavy investments in higher education and research.

As a matter of fact, Norwegian politicians continuously complain that Norway has an economy based on raw materials (oil and marine resources) and that we have shown ourselves incapable of developing a high tech industry like the Finns (Nokia) or the Swedes (Ericsson).

The fact is that advanced technologies play an important part in the Norwegian oil and gas industry, as well as in aquaculture and the fisheries. There are computers and science based technologies everywhere, in all industries and in most countries.

Fast is the final proof that this country is even able to develop a pure information and technology based company capable of entering the American market. Although search engine companies like AltaVista and Inktomi still hang on, Google and Fast have clearly become the most promising search companies on the Net.

That does not mean that Fast hasn't felt the impact of the ICT downturn. Pandia has reported on the downsizing of Fast, and asked Rubin on how the company has been able to continue innovating at the same time as it is loosing personnel.

Rubin replies that the downsizing has not weakened the search engine research staff. As a matter of fact, it has been strengthened. Fast has decided to focus on activities that will bring profit, and the Internet division belongs to these. Fast has now more than 30 Ph.D.'s working on search engine development.

Rubin points out that both the American and Norwegian parts of the Fast is based on meritocracy, i.e. this is a culture that rewards innovation. This may come as a surprise to many Norwegian university researchers, but according to Rubin the NTNU researchers of Fast have become market facing innovators.

The academic underpinning is still there, however. It is for instance reflected in the propensity to avoid introducing new technical solutions before the researchers have mapped the practical consequences as regards performance and scale.

Rubin underlines Fast's wish to listen to users and customers. "We want to make our partners successful," he says. Obviously any decent salesman will say that, but the fact that Fast takes the needs of -- let's say -- professional researchers into consideration, proves that the company takes its reputation seriously. Fast will introduce advanced Boolean searching in its next update of AllTheWeb, even if this is not a feature that will be used by the average searcher.

Rubin says that they consider search engine optimizing companies to be partners, not enemies. This is not self-evident, even if Fast is trying to sell its Partner Site paid inclusion product to this group.

Search engine optimizers are constantly trying to bend the rules in order to get their listings higher in the search results, often using techniques considered spam by the search engines. Fast is doing all it can to combat spam, but clearly finds it useful to show an open attitude to the SEO community. This is also why Fast personnel take part in discussion forums like Webmaster World.

Fast is facing one dilemma, though. On the one hand the company has been very successful in finding portal partners that will use Fast as their main search engine. On the other hand Fast is continuously updating its own search site, AllTheWeb, with new features and technologies.

"We have briefed our partners on this release," Rubin says, and adds that a company like Terra Lycos benefits from having AllTheWeb testing features that Lycos may implement later on. Lycos may, for instance, start using the query rewriting feature within two months, but without the "About your query" info box.

Fast is running on a quarterly cycle as regards the introduction of new features and technologies. This month they will introduce news searching, topic grouping and query rewriting at the AllTheWeb site. In a three months time Fast will include true Boolean searching and the new 2 billion page database.

This is good news for searchers. Not only is Fast delivering a better search service. Their innovation activities will also force Google and AltaVista to introduce new and better features, giving us a productive arms race.

Fast AllTheWeb
Fast Search and Transfer

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