FAST

UK Search Engines - FAST (alltheweb)

FAST, or AllTheWeb was spawned from Opticom ASA in July 1997 in Oslo, Norway.

This service boasted one of the largest databases of the time, and are still now looking for ways to improve and develop new technologies.

The potential of FAST was recognised by Lycos, whose popularity was waning towards the end of 1999. Lycos invested in FAST and by the Autumn of 2001, Lycos abandoned their crawler and started serving web pages from FAST. At that time FAST was the largest competitor to Google Search Technologies.

Early in 2003, an acquisition between FAST and Overture took place, which has since then been acquired by Yahoo! Inc, thus making obvious the strength of FAST technology as Yahoo is the main competitor to Google nowadays.

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