23 Musings

So, yesterday Bill Gates hinted in his keynote at CES that Microsoft would improve search. It's an area where they haven't really shown any improvement in recent years. I thought to myself at the time, maybe they've finally realised that it's all about the algorithm and the quality of results you deliver to users, not in the interface and fancy AJAX tools.

So I watched, and waited, and lo and behold they announce an offer to buy FAST Search and Transfer!

The offer comes to approx $1.2B which is a fair valuation. Rumours are that the shareholders have already approved this and it's all a formality and will go ahead pretty quickly.

Top move Bill! FAST is a great piece of search technology with many applications. It has it's heart rooted in providing good algorithms and tailorable search tools which is exactly where Microsoft should be pushing it's Live Search offering.

Now you just have to integrate this with Adcentre and deliver a Google beating search engine, no small task, that should make the next year very interesting!