Microsoft
is pushing ahead with plans to expand its enterprise and Internet search offerings
even as its quest to purchase Yahoo
remains uncertain and could get uglier.

On Wednesday, Fast Search
and Transfer (FAST), an enterprise search company that Microsoft said it
would acquire in January, added personalization to its existing search product
and divulged more details about how Microsoft will use the technology.

Microsoft is also prepping a new release of its Live Search online offering,
code-named Rome, which was revealed in an SEC document filed as part of the
Yahoo bid but which Microsoft declined to discuss in more detail.

The company's entire search strategy will likely be disrupted if it's successful
in its pursuit of Yahoo. Microsoft seems intent on closing the deal whether
Yahoo's board of directors likes it or not; Microsoft is reportedly going to
mount a proxy fight for Yahoo in which it would attempt to remove Yahoo's board
members, who rejected Microsoft's US$44.6 billion buyout offer.

"There are a lot of moving pieces here," said Chris Swenson, an analyst
with NPD Group, about Microsoft's recent moves in the search market.

Despite this, Microsoft's plan for FAST, the acquisition of which should be
finalized in April or May, seems to be taking shape.

On Wednesday, FAST's Zia Zaman, executive vice president of global marketing
for the Oslo, Norway-based company, unveiled a new category of software that
FAST is developing called interaction management, and a new product under that
umbrella called the FAST Personalization Framework. The framework adds the type
of personalization technology found on consumer Web sites, such as Amazon.com,
that suggests products and services based on previous choices.

Zaman said this kind of personalization, which FAST acquired through its purchase
of San Francisco-based AgentArts, could be a powerful tool for enterprise search.
A pharmaceutical researcher developing a new drug, for example, could find valuable
information if a search tool delivers not only directly relevant results, but
other results related to that information, he said.

"There is a lot of cool information within the four walls" that researchers
may not even know they're looking for until it appears before them, he said.
And FAST's search technology also searches outside the firewall to find the
most relevant information, which also can be personalized through the new framework,
Zaman added.

Once the Microsoft acquisition closes, FAST will act as a wholly owned subsidiary
of Microsoft and maintain much of its current operations, he said. The company
will report to the SharePoint team, which is part of the business unit that
also includes Microsoft Office. SharePoint is the portal component of Microsoft's
collaboration strategy for Office; it also links in to Microsoft's back-end
CRM and ERP applications and is part of the company's larger business-intelligence
strategy.

SharePoint already lets workers search across company projects hosted through
the product. FAST's technology is expected to enhance and expand the search
capabilities in SharePoint, Zaman said.

For online users, Microsoft offered a new version of Live Search last September
and recently updated its search algorithm to improve its ability to crawl Web
sites after the company identified an indexing problem. According to the SEC
filing, Microsoft is already at work on another major update code-named Rome,
and it will move "full steam ahead" no matter what happens with Yahoo,
according to comments Steve Ballmer made during an employee meeting about the
Yahoo bid.

"We've got to drive ahead with our Rome release of search, we've got to
get in the market, destination search, Windows Live Wave 3, etc.," Ballmer
said, according to the filing.

Despite the SEC filing, Microsoft won't acknowledge Rome's existence. Through
an e-mail from its public relations firm, the company said it won't comment
on "speculation about internal code names."

NPD's Swenson said that if the Yahoo deal doesn't go through, Microsoft could
choose to use the FAST acquisition to bolster not only its enterprise search
offerings but also its Internet search. If the deal does go though, it will
become more complicated as to which search technology will be applied where,
he said.

Despite the downside of having to combine so many search technologies, buying
Yahoo would offer Microsoft a host of new opportunities to expand both its Internet
and enterprise search efforts, Swenson added.

Zaman said Microsoft and FAST are still ironing out exactly where -- outside
of SharePoint and a standalone enterprise search offering -- FAST's technology
will be put to use. Enhancing Live Search is a possibility, he said, but there
are no specific plans for that yet.

IDG News Service

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