You may have heard of the recent announcements about Google Instant Results (TM) which is being touted as a new way to do search in the consumer search space.

Our area of focus is in implementing search within the Enterprsie and we decided to see what it would take to implement this using FAST ESP and to evaluate the benefits of such an interaction paradigm for a public facing site search.

We were able to standup a simple implementation of a different variation of such an approach, within two days, by leveraging a recent FAST Enterprise Search project we did for Service and Location Finder (SLF) we did for the Ontario Govt.
We dubbed approach “FAST Results” 😉

What we found ?

The dynamic interaction might be appealing to internet savvy users who are used to consuming a lot of information very quickly.

The volume of unrelated content presented can sometimes be a little disconcerting. For example if you are looking for “Vacuum Cleaners” you might see results about Verizon, Vans, Vacations etc. before you see vacuum cleaner related FAST results returned. The reason for this is, of course understandable.

Our Conclusion ?

Within the Enterprise Search arena, an interaction paradigm such as FAST Results might be quite useful in environments where the domain of content being searched is well defined. E.g. List of services offered, book titles or restaurant search.