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Lervik says the market for eletronic catalogs caps around $18-20 billion annually. He predicts that the market for targeted search-based advertising will reach a 3rd ($6 bio) of that amount in 2006.
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So, FAST is taking up the competition with Google. I wonder if it will work with feeds?
My translation from Norweigan to English is not that sharp - maybe our members from Norway can elaborate more on this?
Source: Digi.no [digi.no] (in Norweigan only)
The Yellow Pages
Phone Books
Timetables (planes, trains, buses etc.)
Maps
Lexicas
Mr. Lervik calls this "Univeral searches" were the search results are pulled from many different sources when it`s relevant to the specific search that is performed.
If you for instance are searching for the name of a person you can get his address, phone number, e-mail address and a map of were he lives/works in addition to the web pages that are relevant to the search.
If you are searching for a destination , you can get lexical information, maps and timtables in addition to the usual web pages that we see in the SERP`s today.
According to Mr. Lervik this new functionality opens for new advertising opportunities and therefore also new sources of revenue for Fast.
Okay, what I find puzzling here is the last sentence:
"new advertising opportunities"?
The only place where they could pull revenue from advertizing would be ATW - which they swear is only R & D.
..and revenue opportunities
Lervik mentions that user might have to pay for services like prices on air fares etc. and that companies might have to pay for getting their product catalogs listed/shown (pfi). He also ads that additional specialized search services can be a good opportunity for companies to run more targeted advertising.
Whatever - it's good to see ambition on the search market. And I definitely would wish for ATW to loose it's status as mere sandbox and go into a search destination marketed to the general public..
Agreed, they should do something about alltheweb - as a 'research destination' it works well for me, but I dont' talk to many people who use it outside of promoter's and such.
Putting a few killer features on it might just do the trick. Or letting their partners - lycos perhaps? - in the US use some better tech, perhaps more people would start using them.
It's always great news to hear about another company pioneering more & different aspects of searching / information retrieval.
And I fear that if Google doesn't place 'The European' part in higher gear, those Europeans may change their mind and stay with the European Search Engine from Fast...
