Inktomi Corporation was an American

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...

(ISP) software developer based in Foster City, California. Customers included

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

, HotBot, Amazon.com, eBay, and

Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States and 23 other ...

. The company developed Traffic Server, a proxy server

web cache A web cache (or HTTP cache) is a system for optimizing the World Wide Web. It is implemented both client-side and server-side. The caching of multimedia and other files can result in less overall delay when web browser, browsing the Web. Parts o ...

for World Wide Web traffic and on-demand

streaming media Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a Computer network, network for playback using a Media player (disambiguation), media player. Media is transferred in a ''stream'' of Network packet, packets from a Server (computing), ...

which transcoded images down to a smaller size for users of

dial-up Internet access Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...

. Traffic Server was deployed by several large ISPs including AOL. In 2003, after the bursting of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

, the company was acquired by

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

for $241 million. The company's name, pronounced "INK-tuh-me", was derived from a

Lakota Lakota may refer to: *Lakota people, a confederation of seven related Native American tribes *Lakota language Lakota ( ), also referred to as Lakhota, Teton or Teton Sioux, is a Siouan languages, Siouan language spoken by the Lakota people of ...

legend about the trickster spider

Iktomi In Lakota mythology, Iktómi is a spider- trickster spirit, and a culture hero for the Lakota people. Alternate names for Iktómi include Ikto, Ictinike, Inktomi, Unktome, and Unktomi. These names are due to the differences in languages betwe ...

, known for his ability to outsmart larger adversaries. The tri-color nested cube logo was created by Tom Lamar in 1996.

History

Inktomi was founded in January 1996 by

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier at the University of California, Berkeley. The company was initially founded based on the

web search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

that was developed at the university. HotBot was the first search engine that made use of Inktomi's search technology.

1998 to 1999

In June 1998, the company raised $36 million in an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

. Its success in making HotBot the top rated search engine led to Microsoft, Yahoo! and Disney all partnering with Inktomi. In September 1998, the company acquired C2B Technologies for $95 million in stock, adding shopping engine technology to its portfolio. In November 1998, the company raised additional capital at a 688% premium to its IPO price five months earlier. In March 1999, CEO David Peterschmidt said that Inktomi would become an "arms merchant" to a growing number of

content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

service providers. Inktomi received revenue based on a percentage of sales and/or a

pay per click Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a search engine, website owner, or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. This differs from more t ...

model. In April 1999, the company acquired Impulse Buy Network, adding 400 merchants to its shopping engine. In November 1999, the company acquired Webspective, which developed technology for

content management Content management (CM) are a set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referre ...

across a host of distributed servers to be used in load balancing, for $106 million in stock.

21st century

In March 2000, the company's stock peaked at a price of $241 per share. In August 2000, the company acquired Ultraseek Server from

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Go.com Go.com (also known as The Go Network) is a portal for Disney content and a single sign-on system that was created after The Walt Disney Company acquired the search engine Infoseek. Go.com is operated by Disney Interactive's Disney Online. It ...

. In September 2000, the company acquired FastForward Networks, which developed software for the distribution of live streaming media over the Internet using "app-level" multicast technology, for $1.3 billion in stock. In December 2000, the company acquired the Content Bridge Business Unit from Adero, a content delivery network, which had formed the Content Bridge Alliance with Inktomi and other ISPs, hosting providers and IP transport providers in August 2000. An article written by Danny Sullivan for

Search Engine Watch Search Engine Watch (SEW) provides news and information about search engines and search engine marketing. Search Engine Watch was started by Danny Sullivan in 1996. In 1997, Sullivan sold it for an undisclosed amount to Mecklermedia (now WebM ...

on October 1, 2001, revealed that Inktomi accidentally allowed the public to access its database of spam websites, which contained over one million of such sites, through a search result on competing search engine

AllTheWeb AlltheWeb (sometimes referred to as FAST or FAST Search) was an Internet search engine that made its debut in mid-1999 and was closed in 2011. It grew out of ''FTP Search'', Tor Egge's doctorate thesis at the Norwegian University of Science and T ...

. The database was found by Brett Tabke, who ran the Search Engine World website. In July 2001, the company acquired eScene Networks, which developed software that provided an integrated workflow for the management and publishing of video content. In 2002, after the burst of the

, the company was restructured by Keyur Patel who joined Inktomi as investor, and senior vice president, strategy, marketing and technology. His restructuring led to the sale of the Ultraseek Server product (renamed Inktomi Enterprise Search) to Verity in late 2002 and the sale of the rest of the company to

Yahoo! Search Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results. Originally, "Yahoo! Search" referred to a Yahoo!-provided interface that sent Web search query, queries to a searchable index of pages supple ...

for $1.63 per share, or $241 million, completed on March 19, 2003. In 2006, the technology behind the Inktomi Proxy Server was acquired by Websense, which was modified and included in the Websense Security Gateway. In 2009, Yahoo! donated the Traffic Server technology to the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

References

External links

Inktomi's Wild Ride - A Personal View of the Internet Bubble
{{Dot-com Bubble 1996 establishments in California 1998 initial public offerings 2003 disestablishments in California Companies established in 1996 Companies disestablished in 2003 Defunct software companies of the United States Discontinued Yahoo! services Dot-com bubble Defunct internet search engines Yahoo! acquisitions 2003 mergers and acquisitions