Pining for the fjords: Microsoft bids $1.2 billion for Norwegian search company

Wow! Having made a leap of faith to incorporating the FAST search technology into the e-commerce platform while at Getty Images, I never thought they'd end up as a Billion Dollar (Microsoft) Baby! In seriousness, one of our concerns in signing up as a FAST customer was their size and could they survive against the likes of Google. Guess that question's been laid to rest.

At Getty Images, the focus of the search engine was to improve the e-commerce search capabilities. It would appear that Microsoft's focus wasn't on external search but inward-facing enterprise search.

How many companies are using enterprise search internally today? If you are currently using or planning to deploy it, how did you go about justifying it? What considerations for protection of the company's confidential information were made? Certainly enterprise search is a need if we are going to be able to develop the kinds of flexible, "now" information platforms needed in the future. That said, for most companies I suspect it's not high on the shopping list for 2008. What's your take?

Pining for the fjords: Microsoft bids $1.2 billion for Norwegian search company: "

Enterprise search is one of the bigger holes in Microsoft's enterprise software line. Now the company plans to plug the gap with a $1.2 billion purchase.

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(Via Ars Technica.)