Inktomi

Iktomi is a spider-trickster god in Lakota mythology.

Inktomi was a Californian company that provided software for Internet Service Providers, which was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the search engine they developed at the university.

Their software was incorporated in the widely-used HotBot search engine, which displaced AltaVista as the leading web-crawler-based search engine, and which was in turn displaced by Google. In a talk given to a UC Berkeley seminar or Search Engines in October 2005, Eric Brewer credited much of the AltaVista displacement to technical differences of scale (Inktomi used distributed network technology, while AltaVista ran everything on a single machine).

The company went on to develop Traffic Server, a "bandwidth multiplier" that was essentially a network cache tool. Traffic Server found a limited marketplace due to several factors. Most notable was the requirement that it be configured as a proxy server for web clients in order to be of use -- a difficult selling point to overcome when comparable functionality being directly embedded in Cisco routers in a way that was invisible to the end user and administrators.

Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo! in 2002.

External link

The Inktomi Search Engine