It took me some time but i figured out some differences between Microsoft Search Server / MOSS 2007 and Microsoft FAST ESP. These differences are not coming from Microsoft or the FAST company. But it came to my notice that Microsoft and FAST will announce a complete and correct list with these differences between the two products at the conference in Las Vegas next week.These differences willl help me and you to make the right descisions at our customers for implementing search and are based on business requirements.
Data Volume Scalability
FAST ESP has proven their scalability and can handle many millions of documents and even up to billions of documents. The system delivers a scalable system based on expanding hardware. MOSS will still perform up to 20 million documents. Above this the search solution is not supported anymore by Microsoft.
Query Rate Scalability
FAST ESP will deliver a model which can handle up to a thousands QPS (Queries per second), while MOSS QPS is still unknown. FAST ESP is a product on the market which differs from its competitors because it expressses its query rate in QPS in stead of QPM (Queries per minute).
High availability
FAST ESP can be deployed in a distributed manner so thtat there is no single point of failure, while MOSS only uses one index server and has a single point of failure.
Taxonomy
FAST ESP provides contextual search insight information over arbitrary XML content. This is not available in MOSS.
Navigation
FAST ESP has something called FAST recommendations which recommends based on user profiles and activities. This is not available in MOSS.
Real-time alerts
FAST ESP supports real-time alerts to monitor ingested content and alerts the user through mechanisms like SMS, Email, Blackberry and other means. This is not available in MOSS.
Faceted Navigation on Metadata
One of the biggest advantages of FAST is that OOTB Entity extraction capability is over 30 different entities (e.g. companies, products, persons, and more). It also supports Deep navigation technology. While MOSS supports only a shallow faceted search solution based on its results by best bets.
Advanced federation
FAST ESP supports advanced federation including sending queries to various web search APIs, mixing results, and shallow navigation. MOSS only supports federation without mixing of results from different sources and navigation components, but showing them seperatly.
Relevance tuning
FAST ESP has an open architecture and is fully configurable for relevancy. There is a management GUI for business rules. MOSS is not easy to configure for tuning relevancy. As stated code level changes are required).
Linguistics
FAST ESP supports word flexion for 32 languages with high quality of lemmatization. Also spell check like "Did you mean" is available for these languages. There is an ability to tune spelling dictionairess and algorithms and indexing support up to more then 80 languages. MOSS 2007 only uses stemming algorithms and basis spell checking with not much configuration abilities.
FAST ESP has also a dictionary management platform for managing dictionaries for synonyms, spell checking, anti-phrasing, lemmatization, black lists, companies, personal names and more. This is not available in MOSS.
Enrichment of indexing and handling search
FAST ESP has a document processing framework which provides the customer with 11 pre-configured pipelines for handling various types of content (e.g. HTML, unstructured data like PDFs and Office documents). Each of those pipelines can be customized based on over 100 stages. You are able to define your own pipelines and stages. Stages are developed in Python. This is not available in MOSS.
Doing Search
FAST ESP supports approximate search like people find with fuzzy logic, n-gram search, synonyms, spell check, lemmatization and wildcards like pre, post and full. MOSS supports only wildcards like * and has no front truncation.
Duplicate results
FAST ESP has a framework which supports for pre-index and query time results so called de-duplication. This can be customized like same title, author and other means. This is not available in MOSS.
Reporting
MOSS 2007 supports simple query reporting and has some trouble when you want to transfer logs to 3rd party tools, while FAST ESP supports sophisticated query reporting including top queries, top zero-result queries, managed queries and more. Query logs are in W3C format and tools are provided to support transfer these logs to RDBMS for analysis using 3rd party reporting tools like SQL Server Reporting and Crystal Reports
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