So much for the cross-platform promises: Bjorn Olstad, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of FAST, has revealed that beyond 2010 there will be no more Microsoft FAST enterprise search products which support Linux and UNIX search cores.

Innovation is at the heart of our enterprise search strategy, and a commitment to innovation is what brought FAST and Microsoft together.

Going through my Saturday morning news articles I came across a title guaranteed to catch my eye. It is an article on Yahoo news titled "Microsoft to Drop Linux, Unix Versions of Enterprise Search". Naturally I had to read this article.

It must be depressing to be Microsoft these days. To have Doug Cutting's excellent Lucene, an open-source search project, and Solr, an enterprise search server based on Lucene, offer better performance at a 100-percent discount.

Some critics of existing search engine products say there is a growing need for alternatives to the proprietary search companies and the big business associated with sponsored information and ad revenue from search results. A few innovators are conducting a quest for new search engines and an alternative to the influences of ranking done by proprietary search platform.

For months, I've been trying to get Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) to answer a few questions about the Unix technologies in its intellectual property portfolio. Microsoft agreed to an interview, then backed out. So the question remains: How much Unix code does Microsoft have its hands on?

Late last night I was surfing the web and reading the news on CNN.com, where upon I noticed their search bar at the top of the page. I decided to place the keyword "linux" into the search box; I clicked the search button to see if there was any Linux-related news that I might have missed. What I found in the paid search really shocked me and upset me. In the number one position, it said the following: "Compare Windows to Linux
www.Microsoft.com Making a Server Platform Decision? Read About Windows Server vs. Linux". The site in question: http://www.microsoft.com/

Another search engine; another algorithm. When will it all make sense? ;)

Global Regular Expression Print is the rather un-catchy full name of grep, the staple of any Linux users toolkit. It is a search tool run from the command line that is evolved directly from Unix, and is so useful it deserved a post of its own.