Fast has got money to burn - any suggestions?

private placement

[heini]

A private placement has brought Fast 258'628'100 NOK = 33'247'597 Euro.

Fast says "funds have been raised to further improve the financial platform for the Company’s operations"

That's some nice extra funding - now lets hope Fast will use the money for the websearch divison.

Any suggestions for improvements to Fast anybody?

[NFFC]

$29,000,000
£20,000,000

[TallTroll]

Hire some techies away from Google :)

Seriously though, now Northern Light has sold out, I would like to see someone take the "independent research engine" slot. FAST have a strong crawler setup, and an existing interest in this area (Scirus). One push now, and they could dominate the niche

heini provided a good analysis here [webmasterworld.com] of Scirus, but I'm sure it could stand to have a few million thrown at it

[mrwoollymammoth]

FAST must have plenty technical talent to come up with what it did so far.
Take a look at [zend.com...] or couple others in the FreeBSD core development group. What FAST needs to do is probably to hire content editors to nurse the AlltheWeb content similar to Google or others. SCIRUS.com is FAST technology "nursed" :) by Elsevier science
won the Best Specialty Search Engine award.

[heini]

>FAST must have plenty technical talent to come up with what it did so far.

That meets with my rather uneducated judgement. But then - small wonder. They must have been hiring every talent from NTNU for the last 5 years or so.

Nice link, mrwoollymammoth
that one has slipped by me so far. He's a real php GURU, right?

>nursing content
What I'm wondering about, where's the white papers on Fast ranking? They are doing some pretty amazing stuff - think Fast topics, they do some theming, they're in link weighing...

[GoogleGuy]

Congrats to the FAST folks on pulling down some $$. Or maybe I should write it kr? Either way, best wishes--personally, I think they should treat every programmer to a week of vacation. ;)

[Brett_Tabke]

I know - they could sponsor Bar Conference [barconference.com]! (Thanks Fast! we owe you one!)

[mayor]

My site traffic shows Fast rising in the ranks at a steady pace. So whatever it is they're doing, I say just keep doing it.

And keep an open dialog with the Webmaster community.