Google bypassed in search deal
AOL chooses Norwegian firm for niche service
In a blow to Google Inc., which provides general Web search for America Online members, AOL yesterday said it has chosen Fast Search & Transfer to power a revamping of its local search service.
AOL's deal with Fast, a Norwegian company with US operations in Needham, underscored Google's vulnerability in niche fields such as geographic-based search. Over the past year, AOL has tapped two other niche search engines, BizRate and Kayak, to provide shopping and travel search capabilities for the online service.
"It's surprising that Google's local search product wasn't considered good enough," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, a website that tracks the search industry. "AOL wants to partner up with whoever gives them the best results in a specific area."
Ali I. Riaz, the Needham-based chief operating officer of Fast, said the AOL deal is one of the biggest -- and the most important strategically -- in the eight-year history of his enterprise search company. Neither company would disclose its financial terms.
With their agreement, AOL will license Fast technology to provide a locally focused crawl of the World Wide Web for AOL members looking for everything from school lunch menus at their children's elementary schools to soccer organizations in their communities to local Japanese or Mexican restaurants.
Riaz said Fast employs an advanced "geosearch" family of algorithms that enable "contextual navigation" to connect queries with their context. "We provide the invoice number, the customer name, the cake recipe that individuals want," Riaz said. By contrast, he said, "Google has thousands and thousands and thousands of servers that run on one simplistic model and provide the same results for everyone."
Google spokesman Steve Langdon declined to comment on AOL's choice of Fast over Google as its local search engine.
AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., already offers search in conjunction with its local content such as CityGuide, MapQuest, Moviefone, and AOL Yellow Pages. Its local search update will pool all the data and create a more intuitive search experience for members, said Gerry Campbell, general manager and vice president of search and navigation for AOL in Dulles, Va. "When you start with a geographically focused Web crawl, the local relevance will be much higher," Campbell said. "The Web is at the point now where there's lots of great information in everybody's area."
AOL will attempt to make money in local search not from its members but from advertisers that will pay for space near local search results.
Campbell said Fast was chosen over Google and other search engines because its technology was a particularly good fit for local search. "AOL believes very strongly in finding partners that are very good at specific parts of the search experience," Campbell said. Many details of the partnership with Fast, including the date on which its technology will be deployed, remain to be worked out, he said.
In beefing up its local search offering, AOL will be competing with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Google itself, all of which are marketing local search services. While it owns less search technology than its rivals, AOL has the advantage of a built-in base of 22.7 million US members for its online service.
Fast, founded in Oslo in 1997, went public in Norway in 2001. It has about 140 employees in Oslo and another 140 in Needham.
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 