The answer, according to Russ Houberg is the relevancy, and what happens to the quality of your search's results as you scale up the size of your index. At the moment, 50 million documents is SharePoint's ceiling, and it needs to be higher because the amount of content we are generating is growing all the time. Back in the 90's Altavista was a good search engine, but as the Internet grew, the relevancy of the results it came back went down. With Search Server 2008, SharePoint will have federated search, so soon the amount of content SharePoint can handle will be much more than 50 million, but to keep the quality of the results good, something like FAST is needed.
As a recent press release said "Together, FAST and Microsoft are dedicated to delivering truly relevant, scalable and security-enhanced enterprise search solutions that drive business value for customers." Note the first two there: relevancy and scale. They go hand in hand.
Labels: Search
