History Search Engines - Inktomi

Inktomi – Born in 1996

 

Inktomi was founded in February 1996 by Eric Brewer, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California Berkeley, and Paul Gauthier, a graduate student. They were involved in a government research project funded by the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency on parallel computing between personal computers and workstations making them function like a supercomputer. In the process they founded a company based upon their success developing a search tool.

The company was named after a mythical Lakota Indian spider known for cunning rather than brute force. After formation with Dave Perterschmidt as CEO, Brewer as the chief scientist, and Gauthier as the chief technology officer, the company established its first customer with HotWired who introduced the search engine HotBot in 1996. HotBot included Inktomi’s Audience 1 software that customized web pages and advertisements according to the user’s browser. HotBot eventually evolved into newer versions including 5.0 released in 1998 using a Windows NT rather than Unix platform. The interface and server infrastructure was changed to increase usability and offer new features.
Inktomi was not just a search provider; its mission was to build scalable software applications at the core of the Internet. As such, Inktomi’s efforts drove many of the search tool developments and functionalities of known search tools and also management tools of Internet traffic and capabilities in general. For example in 1997, Inktomi beta tested web traffic servers that managed network data flow eliminating bottlenecks and redundant Internet and corporate Intranet traffic and bandwidth. The servers used caching to create localized repositories of information. This moved information closer to the user rather than relying each time on the Internet’s backbone. At the time, the amount of redundant traffic on the Internet was between 40 and 80 percent. Accordingly, a large market existed for such technology with Internet service providers, network providers, and business enterprises. A large customer who took interest in Inktomi’s traffic server technologies was Microsoft in 1997. Microsoft agreed to use Inktomi’s traffic server and search engine technology in the Microsoft Network starting in 1998.
Starting in 1998, Inktomi signed many customer deals. America Online and Digex Inc. became licensees of Inktomi’s Traffic Server and began using it in their own networks later that year. Inktomi also worked out deals with Digital Equipment Corporation and Intel to port Traffic Server with their Unix and Windows NT platforms. Also in May of 1998, Yahoo! decided to use Inktomi’s search engine technology as their preferred choice. All of these deals influenced Inktomi’s initial public offering in June 1998. The price of the share the first day doubled from $18 to $36 and a month later was trading at $90. In November 1998 it had climbed to $130 a share.
Some other significant events in 1998 included the release of Traffic Server 2.0 with a streaming media cache, more protocols, and other performance and support functions. That same year, Inktomi acquired C2B Technologies for about $90 million, helping development of shopping search abilities and services for customers like Yahoo! and New Media. The shopping engine debuted in the spring of 1999. About the same time, Inktomi acquired ImpulseBuy.net for $110 million, providing a database and more capabilities for merchants. As its ecommerce shopping services expanded in 1999, Inktomi upgraded and released Traffic Server 3.0. Traffic Server 3.0 included more support for operating systems including Windows NT and new application programming interfaces allowing third party providers to provide value-added services. As a result, with Traffic Server 3.0’s release, Inktomi announced partnerships with six service partners.
In August 1999, a secondary stock offering was made raising $300 million. About the same time, Inktomi purchased WebSpective Software for $106 million. Towards the end of the year, Inktomi released Traffic Server E5000 and Traffic Server E200. These traffic servers helped corporate networks manage data for users without having to use the entire network and server infrastructure. At the end of 1999, America Online dropped Excite for Inktomi’s database to power its search engine. Likewise, MSN dropped AltaVista, whom they had moved to using earlier in the year, for Inktomi.
In 2000, Inktomi created alliances with several partners to enter the wireless Internet infrastructure market. In June 2000, Inktomi acquired Ultraseek from Infoseek for $344.7 million. Inktomi announced creation of a 500 million record search engine database called GEN3. In August 2000, Inktomi created an alliance with America Online and Adero Inc. to form the Content Bridge distribution network. The Content Bridge would allow web producers and hosts of information and ecommerce, to pay to have their content pushed to caching servers of a large network of Internet hosting delivery providers. Right before the Content Bridge was to begin operation in January 2001, Adero backed out and sold its interest to Inktomi for $23.5 million.
In another big business deal in 2000, Inktomi acquired FastForward Networks for $1.3 billion. FastForward Networks dropped its name and became a part of Inktomi’s media division. FastForward Network was a software developer for Internet broadcasts providing support for thousands of simultaneous Internet broadcasts. With this acquisition, Inktomi was able to release a product suite called Media Distribution Network that handled distribution of steaming media in a network. The Media Distribution Network suite complimented well their Content Delivery Suite for managing and distributing static content.
In 2001, Inktomi introduced its Search Everywhere solution integrating Inktomi’s various search products. Inktomi also commenced enhancing its search engine software with enterprise-level XML (Extensible Markup Language) and more comprehensive search results including relevance, classification and rankings. Inktomi added a distributed crawling architecture scanning the web more frequently with content blending from separate databases. In February 2001, Inktomi released Traffic Server 4.0 extending the platform to Linux operating systems with increased processing power and performance. In May 2001, Inktomi introduced a pay-for-placement program called Index Connect in which participants could submit meta information about multimedia and other files enabling them to appear in search results.
About the same time, in order to lessen the strain of its ecommerce business, Inktomi sold off its ecommerce division with its shopping search engine and customer base to e-centives, an online marketing firm. Meanwhile, Inktomi expanded its content distribution services. In July 2001, Inktomi acquired eScene Networks with its streaming media sales. From this acquisition was developed the Inktomi Media Publisher with capabilities for business to catalog, index and publish their multimedia content.
Despite successful acquisitions and product releases, Inktomi sustained financial losses during 2001. With the dotcom bubble bust came economic strains to the Internet business sector. As a result, Inktomi cut back its workforce. Inktomi’s stock values decreased, causing a significant loss for the year.
In March 2003, Inktomi was purchased by Yahoo! for $235 million. Inktomi continued to provide results to Yahoo! rival MSN Search. Meanwhile, Google continued to provide results to Yahoo! In February 2004, Yahoo! replaced Google with a search engine based on Inktomi’s technologies.