By Benjamin J. Romano
Seattle Times technology reporter

Two weeks ago, Microsoft ponied up $1.2 billion to buy a leading player in enterprise search, a growing corner of the market that isn't dominated by Mountain View. Yet.

If the deal goes through as expected in the second quarter, the acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer, based in Oslo, Norway, will rank among the six largest in Microsoft history.

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Only 21 percent of the 450 enterprise companies she surveyed had bought some form of search or categorization technology. Another 21 percent plan to in the next two years.

Hundreds of small companies are working on software and systems to scour a business' digital resources and quickly bring back relevant information, regardless of where or how it is stored.

They provide different solutions for different scenarios.

The call-center worker with a customer on hold needs a quick, definitive answer, not a list of 200 documents to thumb through.

A biotechnology researcher may want a brain dump of everything the company knows about a particular molecule, and everything that's been published about it in scientific journals.

This kind of search has to be able to peer into data stores and applications from different vendors and find information in "every format under the sun," Feldman said.

The tools also have to be able to limit access to certain information within a company — think human-resources data or trade secrets.