Fast Search & Transfer

Fast Search and Transfer ( recursive acronym: FAST) is a subsidiary of Microsoft. The Norwegian company specializes in Enterprise Search.

FAST was a corporate spin-off of 1997, the Natural Sciences and Engineering University of Norway ( NTNU ), Trondheim. The company sold its Internet search (Web Search Unit) with the flagship project, the search engine Alltheweb, in February 2003 for $ 100 million in Overture. In June 2003, FAST bought in return the Corporate Search AltaVista ( AltaVista Enterprise Search Business ) from Overture. Overture (including AltaVista ) was then taken over in July 2003 for 1.6 billion U.S. dollars from Yahoo. 2008, Microsoft FAST took over for 840 million euros. In Oslo, there is still a research and development center.

The web crawler is called FAST FAST- WebCrawler. FAST provides, inter alia, the search engine technology for science search engine Scirus. Customers include, inter alia, AT & T, Reuters, Dell, BASF, Bayer, and Walt Disney.