Inktomi Corporation was a company that provided

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consist ...

for

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise priva ...

s (ISPs). It was incorporated in

Delaware Delaware ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Maryland to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and New Jersey and the Atlantic Ocean to its east. The state takes its name from the adjacent ...

and headquartered in

Foster City, California Foster City is a city located in San Mateo County, California. The 2020 census put the population at 33,805, an increase of more than 10% over the 2010 census figure of 30,567. Foster City is sometimes considered to be part of Silicon Valley ...

, United States. Customers included

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

HotBot HotBot was an American web search engine owned by Lycos. It was launched in May 1996 by ''Wired'' magazine. During the 1990s, it was one of the most popular search engines on the World Wide Web. History HotBot was launched in May 1996 by HotWir ...

, Amazon.com,

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

, 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 from the United States, headquarter ...

. The company developed

Traffic Server The Apache Traffic Server (ATS) is a modular, high-performance reverse proxy and forward proxy server, generally comparable to Nginx and Squid. It was created by Inktomi, and distributed as a commercial product called the Inktomi Traffic S ...

, a

proxy server In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a reques ...

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 multimedias and other files can result in less overall delay when browsing the Web. Parts of the sys ...

for

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

traffic and on-demand

streaming media Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content i ...

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 AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...

. In 2003, after the bursting of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Comp ...

, the company was acquired by

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Mana ...

for $241 million. The company's name, pronounced "INK-tuh-me", was derived from a legend of the Lakota people about a trickster spider character,

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 between ...

, which was known for his ability to defeat larger adversaries through wit and cunning. 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 land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

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 designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

that was developed at the university.

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 investme ...

. 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, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially rel ...

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. Pay-per-click is usually ...

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) is a set of processes and technologies that supports 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

The Walt Disney Company The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on Octobe ...

's Go.com. 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 Daniel John Sullivan III (born March 9, 1950), better known as Danny Sullivan, is an American former racing driver. He earned 17 wins in the CART Indy Car World Series, including the 1985 Indianapolis 500. Sullivan won the 1988 CART Champions ...

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. 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 Yahoo! internet search provider that uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to power results, since 2009, apart from four years with Google until 2019. Originally, "Yahoo! Search" referred to a Yahoo!-provided interface that se ...

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 Forcepoint, an American multinational corporation software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that develops computer security software and data protection, cloud access security broker, firewall and cross-domain solutions. Forcepoint was fo ...

, which was modified and included in the Websense Security Gateway. In 2009, Yahoo! donated the Traffic Server technology to the Apache Software Foundation.

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 Internet search engines Yahoo! acquisitions 2003 mergers and acquisitions