That's what Microsoft Corp.'s Business Division president Jeffrey Raikes asserted Tuesday when he claimed that Google Inc.'s popularity-based search technology produces less accurate results for businesses than FAST's algorithms.
During a conference call after announcing plans to buy Norwegian enterprise search provider Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) for $1.2 billion, Microsoft's Raikes said that Internet search is all about "the number of hits to a particular site," referring to part of Google's vaunted PageRank search algorithm that favors documents that are clicked or viewed often by placing them higher in its results.
How popular is a document "doesn't matter inside a corporate intranet," Raikes continued, "where you have to look at the relevance algorithm to help the business user. That's what FAST has."