Let’s be honest for a moment:  FAST is not the first company you think about when you think of search.  If you’re like me, four days ago, you probably thought the whole competitive landscape for search technology had already been definitively settled. Google won. Game. Set. Match. 

But, like me, you’d be wrong.  The FASTForward Conference in San Diego was a real eyeopener for me and, I know from talking to several other bloggers, a number of us who haven’t been following search nearly as closely as we should.  It wasn’t just the size of the crowd–more than one thousand people (more than double last year’s attendance) or the big name speakers like John Batelle and Andrew McAfee and Tim O’Riley that made the event seem so special–what really raised the magic quotient was the palpable sense of excitement among the many customers and users in attendance that enterprise search is still in its infancy and we’ve only begun to think of great applications for it.  

A lot of this year’s buzz was generated by the idea that enterprise search is the gateway to all those mountains of hard-to-find information that reside in relational databases. (See Joe McKendrick’s great post below). FAST CEO John Marcus Lervik even went so far as to predict that his most fierce competitor in a few years will not be Google, but Oracle.  Huge as the idea of unlocking databases is, it only one of hundreds of applications and refinements of search that are already transforming and disrupting industries.  We’ve barely scratched the surface of contextual search, for example, which will produce real competitive advantage to companies that learn to use it well.

My takeaways from the FASTForward conference are these:  the enterprise search game is still up for grabs.  Google hasn’t already won.  Search is the new portal.  Search changes everything.