Navigating FAST Search Engine Membership and Pricing
If you’re looking to get your website into FAST’s index, the first thing you’ll need to understand is how the membership and pricing structure works. FAST offers a flexible, tiered model that lets you pick the level of service that fits your budget and traffic goals. At the core of the model are two key components: the annual membership fee and the per‑URL cost.
During the “limited time” promotion – although the exact end date isn’t public – the basic package starts at a modest $18 a year. That’s the fee you pay for the right to use the Lycos InSite Select portal to launch and manage your FAST account. On top of the membership, there’s a per‑URL charge of $12. That fee scales with the number of URLs you submit, so if your site contains 200 pages you’ll pay $2,400 in addition to the yearly membership. Resellers may quote slightly different figures, so it’s wise to check with the vendor you’re working with for the precise cost.
When you register, you’ll be prompted to choose between two submission modes: Standard and Advanced. The choice you make determines how the FAST spider will crawl your site and how often it will revisit the pages. Understanding the difference between these modes can save you time, bandwidth, and most importantly, search ranking.
The Standard option starts the crawl at a URL you designate – usually the homepage – and then follows links up to the depth you specify. Think of it as a controlled exploration: you set the boundaries, and the spider stays inside them. If your site has a predictable structure and you know which pages are most critical, this mode is efficient and cost‑effective. It also keeps the per‑URL count low, which is good for keeping fees down.
Advanced submission, on the other hand, lets you hand‑pick every page that must be indexed. Once the spider has crawled all the pages you listed, it will automatically discover new links within your site, but it will only add as many URLs as your subscription limit allows. This guarantees that the pages you care about – such as product pages, landing pages, or high‑traffic content – are guaranteed a spot in the FAST index, even if they’re buried deep in a complex navigation structure.
Choosing the right submission strategy is a balancing act. With Standard, you rely on the spider’s ability to navigate your site efficiently; with Advanced, you pay more upfront but gain certainty about which URLs appear in FAST. For most small to medium‑sized sites, the Standard route offers a good blend of cost and coverage. Larger, data‑intensive sites often find the Advanced route more reliable, especially when they have a lot of dynamic content that the spider might otherwise miss.
It’s worth noting that the membership fee covers a year of inclusion. FAST’s policy guarantees that each URL in your subscription will be rescanned at least every 48 hours. That means any content updates you make will be reflected quickly in search results, a critical factor for sites that need to keep pricing, inventory, or event information fresh.
To sign up, visit the Lycos InSite portal for North American customers at http://searchservices.lycos.com/searchservices/. International customers can use the German site at
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