Inktomi (company)
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| Fate | Acquired by Yahoo! |
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| Founded | February 13, 1996 |
Inktomi Corporation was an American company based in California which provided software for Internet service providers. It was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier, David Brewer, Rob Guyton, Marion Smith, Alex Hern and Tom Lammar. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the web search engine That Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier developed at the university. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo! on December 23, 2002.
Inktomi's software was incorporated in the widely used HotBot search engine, which displaced AltaVista as the leading web-crawler-based search engine, itself to be displaced later by Google. In a talk given to a UC Berkeley seminar on Search Engines in October 2005, Eric Brewer credited much of the AltaVista displacement to technical differences of scale.
The company went on to develop Traffic Server, a proxy cache for web traffic and on-demand streaming media. Traffic Server found a limited marketplace due to several factors, but was deployed by several large service providers including AOL. One of the things that Traffic Server did was to transcode images down to a smaller size for AOL dialup users, leading many websites to provide special noncacheable pages with the phrase, "AOL Users Click Here" to navigate to these pages.
Inktomi acquired many other companies, including C2B and Impulse Buy Networks, two companies that had more than 4 million merchandise products registered in 1998 as they provided millions of product offers daily across some 20,000 consumer-focused websites including Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL Shopping. Merchants paid Inktomi a percentage of sales and/or a cost per click for traffic sent to their websites, a model that later became known as pay per click and was perfected by Google and Overture Services, Inc. Inktomi stock peaked in March 2000 with a split-adjusted price of $241 a share.
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