UPDATE: Norway’s excellent search news service, Pandia, is on the story here.

A major player in enterprise search, federated search, and other areas, Oslo based, Fast Search and Transfer was acquired today by Microsoft. Here’s the official announcement.

Today, from the news release:

Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will make an offer to acquire Fast Search & Transfer ASA (OSE: “FAST”), a leading provider of enterprise search solutions, through a cash tender offer for 19.00 Norwegian kroner (NOK) per share. This offer represents a 42 percent premium to the closing share price on Jan. 4, 2008 (the last trading day prior to this announcement), and values the fully diluted equity of FAST at 6.6 billion NOK (or approximately $1.2 billion U.S.). FAST’s board of directors has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept the offer.

Other Items
Here’s a list of stories where we reported that FAST Search and Transfer was powering part or all of these services, many vertical search tools. This list is intended only to provide an idea of some of the companies Fast has or is working with. We have not verified each partner as current. Again, our point is to show where Fast is or has worked in the past and present. For example, FAST continues to power science search engine Scirus from Elsevier. We’ve bolded the items that have some direct relationship to the library and database biz.

+ 2007: FAST Delivers First Complete Search and Recommendation Platform for Mobile Users

+ 2007: FAST and SPH Search Partner to Offer Singapore’s First Local Search Engine

+ 2007: FAST and Rakuten Announce Joint Venture of Mobile Search in Japan

+ 2007: FAST Acquires Convera Corporation’s RetrievalWare® Business

+ 2007: Invitrogen and FAST Create Premiere Life Science

+ 2007: FAST AdMomentum Released

+ 2007: Elsevier’s ScienceDirect Expands Search Capabilities with FAST ESP

+ 2006: FAST and Global Partners Awarded European Union Research Fund for Multimedia Search

+ 2006: Australia’s Number One Job Site Deploys FAST ESP

+ 2006: Fast Search and Transfer Powers Search at TVGuide in a Federated Type of Operation. ResourceShelf is a big fan of the TV Guide Online Video Guide.

+ 2006: FAST and SirsiDynix partner to enhance search and research solutions for thousands of libraries

+ 2005: Fast Signs Contract With Edmunds.Com

+ 2005: Fast Search and Transfer Signs Contract With Reed Business

+ 2004: FAST Search and Transfer Will Work With Factiva

+ 2004: FAST To Power ECommerce Search for AutoTrader.com

+ 2004: Hurisearch (Human Rights Info) Powered by Fast

+ 2004: FAST Lands the Mercedes-Benz Development Division as a New Client for Their ESP Technology

+ 2004: Knight-Ridder Will Use FAST Technology To Power Online Classified Search

+ 2004: Reuters and Fast

+ 2003: Fast Search and Transfer Technology Powers CareerBuilder

+ 2003: Fast Acquires AltaVista’s Enterprise Search Product

+ 2003: FAST’s Enterprise Search To Power the National Library of Norway’s Information Archives

+ 2003: FAST Search and Transfer Technology Now Powering LexisNexis TotalSearch

Again, for more coverage visit this Pandia post.

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