Microsoft Sibling Rivalry: Fast vs SharePoint
January 5, 2011
Have you ever been curious how SharePoint’s competition measures up? The SharePoint Field Note Blog has a post that compares the regular MSS search with the FAST search: “Developing SharePoint 2010 Search Solutions (Fast and SharePoint).” From a basic glance, MSS and FAST searches aren’t that different. They both have service application infrastructure, metadata schema management, crawl scheduling, and scopes, best bets, and synonyms.
“The biggest differences between SharePoint and FAST is FAST’s more robust ability to crawl millions of documents and better relevance in search results. SharePoint search can efficiently crawl and query up to 100 million documents, whereas, FAST can efficiently do the same up to a 500 million documents.”
Has anyone considered that FAST technology might be superior to SharePoint’s technology? What happens when an organization is dealing with 500 million plus one documents? That might be a weakness. The post also lists individual quirks one will encounter when developing custom search solutions, such as FAST doesn’t support SharePoint Search SQL queries. Both have problems when searching with decimal places, which can be overcome based on the program. In the end, which has the better searching solution depends on what you need for your organization.
Whitney Grace, January 5, 2011
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2 Responses to “Microsoft Sibling Rivalry: Fast vs SharePoint”
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Only “up to 500 million?” There are some existing FAST installations with several times that…
Charlie,
We just recycle in this free blog; we don’t quibble with assertions about index size. Someone told us there were one trillion urls; another asserted that Google had an index of 60 billion Web pages. Big numbers suggest big bologna.
Stephen E Arnold, January 6, 2011