April 3, 2007

FAST Acquires Convera's Retrievalware Technology

Norwegian search technology provider FAST Search & Transfer has picked up Virginia-based Convera's RetrievalWare enterprise search business for $23 million in cash. Convera will continue its recent focus on vertical search technology and services for specialist publishers, and will license FAST's Ad Momentum technology as well, according to Information World Review. The move gives FAST a foothold in the lucrative U.S. government market.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:28 PM | Permalink

February 5, 2007

FAST AdMomentum: Private-Label Contextual Advertising

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) today launched AdMomentum, a private-label contextual advertising platform. The product targets online media companies, retailers and telecommunications service providers, offering a way to monetize traffic to their sites.

The platform offers publishers the ability to sell ads either locally or nationally; provide a self-service environment for their advertisers; and pick from multiple ranking algorithms and customer interfaces to meet the needs of both their audiences and advertisers.

I haven't had a chance to dig deep on the platform yet, but it appears similar to offerings from Quigo, or Marchex's IndustryBrains. Miva and ValueClick are among other PPC providers that have customized implementations for larger advertisers, but do not have a mass-market private label program.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 2:11 PM | Permalink

June 21, 2005

FAST Web Search Is Back Via New Miva Editorial Results

Miva -- the newly rebranded company encompassing FindWhat and Espotting -- has launched its own editorial or "algorithmic" results to compliment the paid listings it offers.

The results are currently only being offered to Miva partners in France and Germany. A press release is here.

The move harkens back to the Overture deals of Feb. 2003 to purchase AltaVista (Overture To Buy AltaVista) and AllTheWeb (Overture To Buy FAST Web Search Division).

Overture made those deals after finding the lack of an all-in-one solution -- editorial and paid results -- was a factor in it losing the AOL partnership deal to Google in 2002. Said then Overture CEO Ted Meisel in an investor conference call at the time:

"We have seen opportunities come and go that we would have liked to have won. We didn't have the full search solution our partners were looking for," Meisel said, during last week's call about AllTheWeb. "Those are the opportunities we would seek to reclaim."

Ironically, the AllTheWeb purchase seemed to have quashed plans Espotting had at that time to expand a deal it had inked with FAST to provide an all-in-one solution. FAST seemed to have sold off its entire web search division to Overture -- itself later purchased by Yahoo.

Despite the sale, FAST still kept its core search technology and has been allowed to offer search services to others. That's something you'd think Overture would have restricted. The failure to do this means despite the purchase of 2003, FAST is still out there competing with Yahoo.

Aside from the deal today, FAST recently had a big victory in January when it beat both Google and Yahoo as possible partners to power local search at AOL.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:24 AM | Permalink

January 21, 2005

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