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 proxy cache for web traffic and on-demand streaming media. Traffic Server was widely deployed by many large service providers including AOL. In September, 2000, Inktomi acquired FastForward Networks, a company that developed software for the distribution of live streaming media over the Internet using "app-level" multicast technology. With this combination of technologies, Inktomi became an "arms merchant" to a growing number of Content Delivery Network (CDN) service providers.

With the financial collapse of the service provider industry and overall burst of the Internet "bubble", Inktomi lost most of its customer base and ultimately was acquired by Yahoo! in 2002.

External link

The Inktomi Search Engine