The first real FAST Search book

Book cover © Amazon & Wrox

Over due by several years, Wrox just published a book about Microsoft Enterprise Search, including the different FAST flavours. Bravo!

You can ask how all the users of FAST technology could have managed for so many years without some public source of learning the products. Up until now FAST/MS and their partners have been the sole source of learning FAST Search [1]. Now, we’re part of that eco-system and may have profited on the lack of material available, but that’s another story.

FAST to abandon Linux and Unix

In a recent blog post by CTO Bjørn Olstad, referenced by CNet, Beyond Search and Norwegian digi.no today, FAST announces that ESP 5.3 is the last version of their Enterprise Search Platform to run on Linux or Unix.

As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.

Bing – first thoughts

picture-1Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” which replaces Live Search, promises to be a decision engine rather than a search engine. Cominvent has tried it.
The front page of “Bing” is nice looking. I’m in Alexandria, and want to decide how to get from Alexandria to Hurghada, so I type “how to get from alexandria to hurghada”. The result set is a non-impressive boring listing of results, with exactly the same look & feel as Google results, not very innovative.

Let’s compare:

Microsoft reveals FAST Search roadmap

Yesterday, Microsoft/FAST announced at the FAST Forward conference in Las Vegas the immediate roadmap of the FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) product line. Also see what CMS Watch writes about the topic. Office 14 The main news is that ESP will be included in Office 14, to serve as the advanced/extended search server of Sharepoint.