A brief history of the Inktomi search engine.

Inktomi is a key player in the search engine market, but also one that is little known, as it operates 'behind the scenes' without having a search facility under its own brand.

Having first appeared in September 1995 it was initially a pioneer of online search techniques and now powers some of the leading web tools, notably MSN, HotBot, Looksmart and others, as well as a number of regional search engines. Dozens of other major web sites use Inktomi Enterprise Search to power their on-site search engine.

When it was launched, Inktomi claimed to have the largest web index of more than 1.3 million documents on the World Wide Web. It was created by Eric Brewer, then an assistant professor of computer science at University College of Berkeley, and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The project was initially funded by the U.S. government's Advanced Research Projects Agency, but it became a commercial organisation in early 1996 and soon after it gained its first major customer with the HotBot search engine.

Soon afterwards, Inktomi removed the direct interface to its search engine from the web, opting instead to operate as a provider of search for other web portals, rather than directly competing with other sites. A major coup came with the agreement to power Yahoo's supplementary search results, and during the years of web boom at the end of the 90's, the Inktomi Corporation went public and rapidly increased in value.

The company grew quickly, offering a variety of web search, e-commerce and enterprise search products, but in recent years Inktomi has suffered a serious of setbacks and business realignments, so that it now largely focuses purely on search technologies. In 2000 Inktomi lost the Yahoo contract to Google and subsequently lost further market share when AOL and Netscape Search also moved their search indexes to Inktomi's biggest rival.

During this time Inktomi was also the first major search engine to launch a paid inclusion service, whereby websites may submit pages on a subscription basis in return for regular and frequent re-indexing. Today Inktomi's largest search partner is MSN, but the company's acquisition by Yahoo at the start of 2003 heralds a possible new dawn for this pioneering search tool.

Read more here:

• Inktomi corporate website
  
• Inktomi company information
  
• Inktomi's web search product
  
• Inktomi's Pure Web Search

How to get a high search engine ranking on Inktomi...

Learn more about the other main search engines: AltaVista, FAST, Google, HotBot, Lycos and Teoma.

To find out how your website can achieve a top ranking on Inktomi and the other top search engines, contact the web search workshop for more information or request a FREE site assessment to see how well your website currently performs.

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