A brief history of the FAST search engine.

FAST is an unusual player in the current search market. It is little known by many web searchers, but provides one of the largest indexes on the web and offers an array of search features and a reputation for generating accurate results from searches.

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) was founded in 1997 as a result of academic research and development from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

It was fully launched in 1999 and has rapidly established itself as a major contender in the search industry, supplying search technology to many international corporations as well as providing the main results for the Lycos network and for its own search tool, All The Web, which acts as the showcase of the search technology available.

FAST now claims to index over 2 billion pages, second only to Google in size, and during 2002 it added a suite of new search options, including searches for news, images, FTP and multimedia files such as videos and MP3. Although highly regarded as a search tool, FAST now needs to 'spread the word' and establish a greater market share to compete with the dominance of Google.

In February 2003 the FAST search engine was acquired by Overture for $100m, only 2 weeks after it also snapped up AltaVista for $140m.

Read more here:

• FAST corporate background
  
• FAST FAQs
  
• Alltheweb Search Home Page
  
• About Alltheweb
  
• Change the Look of Alltheweb

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How to get a high search engine ranking on FAST...

Learn more about the other main search engines: AltaVista, Google, HotBot, Inktomi, Lycos and Teoma.

To find out how your website can achieve a top ranking on FAST and the other top search engines, contact the web search workshop for more information or request a FREE site assessment to see how well your website currently performs.

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