FAST: We're in talks with Yahoo

[heini]

Knut Magne Risvik from FAST yesterday confirmed - yes, we are in close talks with Yahoo.
Itkanalen.com [itkanalen.com]

Risvik doesn't even deny possible partnerships with MSN...

[backus]

Excellent news!

[Rumbas]

Heini you beat me by a second ;)

This is in deed interesting news. July 1st is almost like Christmas.

[agerhart]

Very good news! This will be an interesting summer! Although it will reduce traffic at first seeing the change from Google

[Travoli]

Yes it certainly will be interesting. It would be nice to have another SE to optimize for again.

[Napoleon]

Well... it's only my opinion, so don't shout... but I for one am not happy. I don't rate the FAST index at all and see it as vastly inferior to Google. Not a good day.

[caine]

I think it is excellant news, and luckily enough, i have always considered fast a target on equal status with google, from the point of SEO, and do equally well with fast.

i wonder how much googles serps will go down and how much fast will rise !

[Macguru]

heini,

Sorry for this stupid question but here it goes : What are Fast's technologic advantages over Google to better serve big boys like Y! and MSN? Could they be more flexible on revenue models? Can you please give us a little more info?

[eljefe3]

I also wonder if the $$ works out better for yahoo then sticking with google. With google's rise in popularity, they can probably dictate their terms to yahoo and might be too high a price to pay for Y!

On the flip side, it is good if google doesn't dominate all the major traffic drivers. Fast's results are much better than any other standing SE except for google, so this should be good for us all if this actually happens.

[lazerzubb]

If i understod right from a conversation with people from fast, they have ability to expand there index very much, also they can spider the web very agressive (up to 150 million pages per day). I do belive Google serves better results for english queries, i don't think FAST have got the link-pop all figured out, even though i know they want link-pop to count less. Yahoo is a worldwide portal with many different sites in different languages, i think that is one point where FAST is better than Google. FAST is very good at presenting good serp's for different languages, their spider also recognise many different languages.
Also as you know, Google have taken over some of the traffic from Yahoo, and since FAST doesn't want to be a "destination site" like Google wants Google.com to be i think the people will stay at Yahoo and not switch to Google.com as many people do today.

[caine]

I don't think their is a great deal of difference in relevancy of serps between google and fast, and becuase of Googles, high pr incoming unrelated links, makes it even possibly less relevant.

Another thing is Fast's, advanced search is second to none.

[NFFC]

Yahoo do have a history of playing companies off against each other so I wouldn't get too excited. Having said that good luck to the fast team!

>I don't rate the FAST index at all and see it as vastly inferior to Google.

Napoleon, try these;

to be or not to be [google.com] Google

to be or not to be [alltheweb.com] Alltheweb

[vitaplease]

hey NFFC,

I had never seen that display of "indexed 1 hour ago" in Alltheweb... looks better than Google's Fresh.

To give Google credit in your comparison I guess you should add " " marks to the query. But then normal average surfers would never do that and would not be helped.

[chiyo]

Well would yahoo be able to have their own way of parsing default queries i guess (as phrase, ANd, OR, popular terms AND etc) and Googles SERPs actually seem better than FAST when you add the quotes to the google query.

That said, I must say, update by update, FAST seems to be improving and Google either staying still or going backwards on relevancy, FWIS (from where I sit!)

[agerhart]

>>>Google either staying still or going backwards on relevancy

While Fast is getting better, although there traffic share still seems awful small, I would hardly say that Google's relevancy is getting worse.