Fast Search & Transfer was ones one of the biggest players in the enterprise search filed. But things have changes after they were acquired by Microsoft. Now it looks like Microsoft is pulling the plug on FAST Esp, there main product. Normal support will end at 7/16/2013.

More info about end dates are available at Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search page.

Microsoft will of course continue to provide the Fast Search for SharePoint search engine, but it is sad that they do not want to provide an enterprise search product that is not tied to SharePoint. Customers will have to look to other vendors.

SearchBlox has added a document limit of 25 000 documents for there free version. If you needs more you will now have to buy a “Server Edition” at $5,000 per server per year. The server edition also comes with more features, like distributed indexing and searching, replication and of course support.

More info available from there price page: http://www.searchblox.com/pricing

As part of Google’s spring cleaning 2012 the Google Mini will be discontinued on July 31 2012: http://googleblog.blogspot.no/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-summer.html .

Now the only offer from Google will be either the full Google Search Appliances that starts at approximately 30 000 $ or using the very basic, cloud hosted, Google Site Search ( from $100 to $2 000 pr year depending of number of queries).

It’s currently unknown what this will mean for the other Google Search Appliances box’es. Will there be a cheaper Google Search Appliances to fill some of the gap left by the death of the mini, or are Google considering abandoning physical search box’es all together.

Open Test Search will continue to hold our Mini up and running for the foreseeable future.