Net Buzz with Richard Wiggins | 11

East Lansing, Michigan
Inktomi: You Never Heard of This Search Engine, But You'll Use It

By Richard Wiggins

On April 1 and 2, 1998, Infonortics Ltd. held a search engines conference in Boston. Only about 200 people attended the event; although the audience was small in size, but the roster of speakers and attendees included some very high powered folks. Among the speakers were: Steve Kirsch, founder and CEO of Infoseek; Matt Koll, inventor of Personal Library Software and an America Online fellow; and Donna Harman, who conducts an annual "bake-off" comparison of search engines at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

This august group of presenters also included Eric Brewer, who co-founded a company called Inktomi, and who serves as its Chief Technology Officer. Brewer was astonishingly candid in his presentation, covering these topics:

• Inktomi's unique role as a "vertical" player in the search engines business, serving as a "back-end" engine for multiple highly-visible search sites.
• Inktomi's unique "commodity cluster" search engine architecture, with its advantages in performance and cost-effectiveness.
• Inktomi's unique partnership with Microsoft, which, in concert with other alliances, guarantees the Inktomi engine will process more searches per day than any rival.

Brewer and his colleague Paul Gauthier were, respectively, an associate professor of computer science and a graduate student in that field at Berkeley when they formed Inktomi in 1996. The company name is pronounced "ink-to-me" and was inspired by a spider from the mythology of Plains Indians.

Inktomi's first partnership was with Wired to form the well-known HotBot service. This alliance was announced simultaneously with the birth of the company. Significantly, however, the alliance was not exclusive; Inktomi was and is free to make alliances with other players.

Since that initial alliance, Inktomi has forged deals with numerous other players. Brewer mentioned the following partnerships:

• N2H2, a Seattle-based Web filtering company, integrates their "Bess" content ratings database with Inktomi's index. (www.n2h2.com)

• Anzwers, a search service for the Australian and New Zealand markets sponsored by Australian ISP Ozemail. (www.ozemail.com.au/)

• Nippon Telephone and Telegraph's "goo" service in Japan. (www.goo.ne.jp/index.html)

Brewer said that Inktomi's position as a "vertical" player is unique in the search engine industry. Each partner using the Inktomi engine is free to market it and exploit it in whatever way they see fit. Brewer noted that the Inktomi engine actually has many more features than any of its partners choose to offer their users. Apparently HotBot, for instance, feels it would be confusing to its users to provide them with the full power of the Inktomi engine. (They may be right: several speakers at the conference noted that the typical user types in a one or two word search, and is absolutely unwilling to use special syntax or engage in iterative refinement to compose "proper" – i.e. effective – searches.)

Brewer also described an alliance with a small firm in Redmond, Washington. Read on to learn more about how this little-noticed deal will benefit Inktomi.

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