One of the other speakers at the conference, consultant Stephen Arnold, said it was impossible to overstate the significance of the Windows 98 deal. "People may not realize it, but when they go to Best Buy or WalMart to buy a computer sometime in the next year, that machine is going to have packed inside an Inktomi search engine," he said. "And because people use what they first learn, they’ll want to use an Inktomi engine for all their searches."

It’s quite a paradox, really: every other search service has sought to build a customer base by combining technology with their own Web presence. WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista – all these services represented new technologies delivered exclusively via the Web site of the company that built the technology. There have been modifications at the margin – for instance, AltaVista’s deals with Yahoo and Amazon.com – but for the most part the model has been one of building a brand under the umbrella of the technology’s inventor.

Inktomi has taken a different path. They are a sort of fulfillment house that quietly services their partners’ needs. They let the partners build the service and its brand name and market share, while not attempting to build Inktomi as a brand name for the masses. Instead, Inktomi lets the "front door" search sites they partner with worry about brand building and marketing, while Inktomi sticks to their knitting – tending the server farm and building new technologies.

But by picking the right partner, Inktomi could easily jump to handling 100 million searches per day within a year – leapfrogging the competitive search sites. Despite his assurances about scalability, Brewer said that they will build a mirror Inktomi service at an East Coast location and perhaps elsewhere over the next year. (That may be as important for Internet backbone performance reasons as it is for Inktomi’s internal reasons.)

Presumably, if the deals with Microsoft, HotBot, NTT, Oz News, N2H2, and other partners yet to be named are favorable to Inktomi, and if the cost structure is as low as Brewer indicates, this is a company that stands to make a lot of profit. Investors who flock to the latest Internet offering like moths to flame may not be irrational in placing a vote of confidence in Inktomi.

Is there a downside to the deal with Redmond? One wag in the audience asked Brewer "So, when will you complete your transition to Windows NT as your server operating system?" It seems those "Network of Workstation" servers run Unix today. After audience laughter died down, Brewer said "Actually, for a while our contract with Microsoft would not allow me to answer any questions about the server operating system, but that rule as since been relaxed." As murmurs spread through the conference audience, Brewer continued, "Let me just say that the operating system we’re running is an issue we’re having to deal with."

Hmmm. Maybe converting from Unix to NT is the price you have to pay for 100 million hits per day.