To: Urlman who wrote (1313 ) 8/3/1998 6:54:00 AM From: STEAMROLLER Respond to of 119973
Inktomi out to build a better spider Reuters Story - August 02, 1998 14:05 By Andrea Orr PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug 2 (Reuters) - When the world's most popular Internet service, Yahoo! Inc. , was looking for a reliable technology to power its search engine earlier this year, it teamed up with a company whose name was more whimsical than its own: Inktomi Corp. . That name cropped up again last month when Walt Disney Co. launched a family-focused Web site and selected Inktomi over all the other companies that make search technology. Microsoft Corp. made the same choice. The software giant has not yet launched its new online service, but it has signed a deal for Inktomi to provide the search engine -- often considered back bone of any successful Internet service. Hype and bravado are never in short supply in cyberspace, where new companies arrive on the scene almost daily promising they can provide the best gateway onto the World Wide Web. But Inktomi appears to be succeeding on the strength of its service more than the power of its promotion. Like most Internet companies, Inktomi has not actually made any money, although it has built up a five-star client list of companies in the United States, Japan and Australia. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company went public last month and more than doubled is price on its first day of trading. Now at $57 a share, it is triple its June 10 debut price. Why all the interest? "We've simply got more of the Net than anyone else," explains spokesman Kevin Brown. Quite, literally that is true. Inktomi's Web crawlers, sometimes called "spiders," cover more than 100 million online documents. Most competitors reach only half that amount. In other words, when a person goes online to look for information on a travel destination or a bit of history trivia, they will likely to get more results with a search on Inktomi. The key to this superior service sounds too simple to be true. While most search engines are run on huge supercomputers, Inktomi's is run on a cluster of what co-founder Paul Gauthier calls "plain old workstations" -- 166 of them linked together. Like so many other big Internet companies, Inktomi's technology was born in academia. Before he joined the ranks of 25-year-old millionaires in Silicon Valley, Gauthier was a graduate student at University of California at Berkeley. Gauthier and his teacher, Dr. Eric Brewer, began their work in response to a problem they saw with supercomputers. The massive machines were powerful, but their capacity was not unlimited. The two thought that if they could find a way to get a group of much smaller machines to work together, they could cobble together something superior to the supercomputer. They hadn't initially thought of applying this technology to the Internet, but the timing was right. Across the San Francisco Bay at Stanford University, other students were getting restless with their classes and spending more time on the Internet. Some of them went on to found Yahoo! Inc. and Excite Inc. , and helped transform the Internet from an obtuse research tool into a slick medium like television. In 1995 Gauthier and Brewer they formed a company making Internet search software, and named it Inktomi, an American Indian name for a mythological spider skilled at outsmarting its competitors. Today, Inktomi says it isn't worried about competition. "If you tried to start the same company now, it would be a lot harder," says Brewer. "The Internet is more mature." Brewer, who also made millions on the company's recent IPO still teaches a class at Berkeley. He says his classes are much more popular than they used to be, but he thinks the time may have passed for computer science students to get rich inventing an Internet technology. Some of his critics are not so sure. "Every graduate student in the world is trying to write a better search program," says Dave Jones of the California Technology Stock Letter. "Something could always come out of left field -- just the way Inktomi did." Joe Kraus, a co-founder of Excite, which makes its own search technology, says effective searching is not simply a matter of scanning the most documents. "We think the issue is more about giving people what they are looking for," said Kraus. He admits Excite's search engine only reaches half as many documents as Inktomi but said it has added features designed to bring up the most relevant results. Inktomi has has also branched into another business called network caching, designed to prevent bottlenecks on the World Wide Web by storing more data closer to the end user. Now it says its main concern is building a bigger cluster of computers that can crawl over even more documents, and keep up with the rapid growth of material online. "When there are a billion pages on the Web, we want to be able to keep providing a more representative snapshot," said Brewer.