Last week FAST announced its acquisition of AgentArts, Inc., a personalization and recommendation technology company. (press release)
The acquisition marks a modest step forward for FAST, (in the vernacular of an earlier posting, a "little i"). Search tools that provide recall-enhancing "suggestive" secondary searches is not a new concept. Search pioneering tools, such as Personal Librarian, were offering this type of search enhancement decades ago. But the value and application of the functionality was mostly lost on an inexperienced audience and lack of sizable community. Today, users of tools such as iTunes Music Store (iTMS) and Amazon.com expect to find the functionality of these commercial applications in their enterprise settings. "People who have searched on this have also searched on that" – is a message not foreign to today's enterprise searcher, and should be a welcome addition to the FAST interface.
It is disappointing to see that FAST is targeting this functionality, however, only to its mobile, media, entertainment, ecommerce and knowledge discovery markets rather than as a standard feature of their Enterprise 2.0 search.
Contrast this versus Baynote (listen to colleague Dan Keldsen's podcast on "Powering the Long Tail with Invisible Crowds," whose story includes layering suggestive search and discovery capabilities for enterprise and consumer-facing web properties.
