Fast hitting financial straights

[Brett_Tabke]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Slow]

Wanna see something funny:

<img src="http://www.ose.no/cfxtemp/CFT0905_211358AC.jpg">

[ose.no...]

Bet they wish they had that 300 million back from 2000.

The entire market cap of the company isn't worth that much anymore. (Remember that 10 NOK are worth about 1 dollar...)

[Brett_Tabke]

The Terra Lycos connection may come through for them yet. They have the pay-for-play thing starting this month, and a reworked deal with Lycos in the works.

[JuniorHarris]

Let's keep our fingers crossed for them...I've always liked FAST (alltheweb), as their spider is the best at crawling the net. We still get a trickle of traffic from them and to loose them would not be major, but it would still be a piece of the pie (regardless of size).

[andrey_sea]

Don't care for their spider, our site ranks great in Google and is regularly updated. In Fast it shows pages from about 1 year ago, and resubmitting does not help. Don't see any traffic from them, so would not miss them :-)

May be if they go people will start using wisenut or google more...

[Slow]

The problem with Fast (and no, I will not capitalize the whole thing...) is that, while their Norwegian founders are truly interested in developing a top-notch search engine, their British and American management is trying to cash in their techie cred and sell off-the-shelf products. Honestly, the best thing for that company would be to go back to Norway.

The search engine is good, and could very well pass Google's in relevance and usabilty with a little more refinement. Their hosted services (IBM, Ebay, etc.) are a decent catch. But, please....Data Search, Intranet Search, and Site Search...? How much time have they wasted on these?